Contact
by celtmama
Summary: Assigned to a mission that quickly spins out of control, Tonks meets Remus Lupin for the first time under the direst of circumstances. Ensnared by enemies, their only hope of escape lies in trusting one another.
1. False Assumptions

_**Disclaimer: J. K.**__**Rowling is the creator of these characters, and all credit goes to her. I'm just borrowing them for a bit.**_

_**A/N: I came up with the idea for this story during a discussion on the Metamorfic Moon LJ page and decided to try it out. What would happen if Tonks and Lupin met for the first time while on assignment? **_

_**Not a clue as to how long this will turn out to be, but I can guarantee you a wild ride...**_

* * *

_Rookie assignment, my arse. Just an excuse to shift the crap jobs onto the all the poor slobs at the bottom of the ladder who don't have enough seniority to piss without permission, much less complain about the cases they get._

In the middle of a Sheffield park, cross-legged in the shade of a spreading horse chestnut, a small girl sat all by herself. Despite the lack of other children to play with, to the casual observer she appeared happily absorbed in a small pile of dirt she'd gathered and didn't seem to mind that she was alone. Fistful after fistful was grabbed up, her eyes wide with fascination as the grains trickled back through her fingers. The simple game continued for nearly a quarter of an hour, her interest never wavering, until an ill-timed gust of wind brought it to an abrupt end. Since she'd arrived, the idle summer breeze had done nothing more strenuous than gently tug at the golden ringlets that lay on her shoulders, but now it picked up suddenly, catching the fine particles as they fell from her hand and tossing them back into her face.

She jerked back with a cry, dug grimy fists into stinging eyes, blinked furiously and scowled and kicked a foot at the dirt pile in anger. She seemed unaware of the long muddy streaks on her face thanks to the unhappy combination of tears and dirty hands. Her tantrum didn't last long without an audience to draw it out, though she could be seen glancing around, looking for any sympathetic passers-by. There were none. She was still alone. With a last sniffle, she stood and tried to clean herself up, batting at her tangled curls, raining bits of earth and grass, but she only succeeded in getting her hair and dress dirtier. After a few more half-hearted swipes she gave up and looked around.

_Where the hell is he?_

The girl's face lit up, having spied a tree branch conveniently low enough for her to reach. Running as quickly as short, somewhat unsteady legs would allow, she caught hold and let her momentum swing her forward, legs raised in crook-kneed fashion that displayed to the world how fond this tiny example of femininity was of Mickey Mouse underwear.

_All that effort to be here early—early, for Christ sake!—and for what? To piss around until the Order's golden boy feels like showing up? If Moody ever complains about me being late again, I swear to God I'll set fire to his leg. And maybe his eye._

Grubby knees swung back and forth as the girl gripped the branch, scrabbling a little to get a better hold. Her voice lifted up in a sweet, off-key treble. "Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon, the little dog laughed to see such-"

Her attention was caught by a wandering butterfly, the whimsical nature of its flight bringing a bubble of laughter to her lips. Fingers released their hold on the makeshift swing and she dropped back to the ground, stumbling as she went chasing after the bright-winged distraction.

_No sign of the two we're supposed to trail, either. Am I the only one who bothered to check the time this morning? Death Eaters or not, most people still know how to use a damned clock. I dunno, maybe we were wrong about the location. I told Kingsley that this seemed like an odd place to show up, but does anyone listen to me? Nooooo…_

The girl's interest in the butterfly waned as quickly as it had come. The chase abandoned, she raised her arms to her sides and began a slow spin, laughing as she twirled like a top on the grass before collapsing in a dizzy, giggling heap.

_Complete. Bollocks. The most suspicious thing out here is Mr. Butterfly over there. Or Mrs. Butterfly. Can't really be sure about these things. Kingsley's due a swift kick in the arse next time I see him, along with Mr. Can't Be Bothered To Show Up On Time. Bad first impression, mate, I've got to say. Making me sit here talking to myself about butterflies and which people most need a good throttling._

The girl stood, paused, swooped down again briefly to pluck a flower that had nearly met its death under her sandaled foot. She bent her head to smell the blossom and sneezed. More dirt smeared across her face as she wiped her nose on a forearm. The flower was closely inspected, tossed in the air a few times and finally picked to pieces. When she started twirling around again, she let her fingers fall open to shower the bits of petal, leaf and stem in an arc around her feet.

_I never should have agreed to go into this blind. There's no real reason for the Order to get involved, not in a simple Auror case. Oops, sorry, "rookie" case. If I can't handle a bleeding surveillance assignment on my own, Scrimgeour never would have hired me on in the first place. And if he didn't think I needed backup, why would Moody turn around and saddle me with some guy I've never even met bef-_

The distinctive crack of Apparation reverberated through the neighborhood. The little girl fell still, eyebrows raised in the appearance of mild interest, curls splaying over her shoulders as she looked up into the sky, at the trees, back down the street.

From a nearby alley between two blocks of flats, a pair of men emerged. They talked as they strolled along, turning immediately to the right without looking around and giving every impression that they were familiar with the area. It was only when they came to the crossing that would take them alongside the park that the taller and darker of the two men looked up and saw the girl. He said something briefly to his companion and they changed direction, making for where she stood.

_Oh, hell, those are the two I'm—we're—supposed to trail. Why are they coming over here? Shit. I can't leave now._

The back of her neck prickled briefly, but she tried to bluster away her sudden unease.

_Calm down, you. It's not like they're going to do anything to a Muggle child right here in the open. Probably._

She stared at the strangers, as wide-eyed and curious as she'd been with the butterfly, following their progress into the grass toward her until they stopped just a few feet away. Another wave of unease hit her, shivering down her spine as twin stares pinned her where she stood.

"Hi!" She waved a small hand in tentative greeting. Her seemingly innocent blue eyes flickered between their faces, while mentally she raced through everything she'd read in the files Kingsley had shoved at her a few days before, comparing it with the two men now facing her.

The taller of the pair, the one who'd spotted her, was thickset and massive-shouldered and possessed of impossibly long legs. His leer suggested that he liked nothing better than to chance upon little children alone in city parks. Simon Lennox according to his records, though his file didn't contain much beyond his name. More muscle than brains to look at him, a typical Death Eater bullyboy, though bigger than most. Rumours whispered there was giant blood somewhere in his background. Whoever put together the information on him had somehow skipped over his undisguised penchant for young girls.

The second, his ice-blue eyes fixed intently on her face with an expression somehow even more disquieting than the one on Lennox's, being a shade too cold, too calculating for her comfort, looked much like her childhood impression of biblical angels: graceful, slender, with gilt-hair floating around his fine-boned face. A picture of ethereal masculine beauty. Lucifer before the fall. Oswin Claremont.

_He and Lucius Malfoy must be quite the matching set when they get together. Two-for-one sale at the local Evil Minion store that day? Ahaha, oh God, this whole assignment's fucked._

So near to him now, she found herself trying not to think too hard about the details contained in his inches-thick file; every account spoke all too vividly of a monster lurking underneath the beautiful exterior. Easier to fall back on snide internal commentary rather than focus on how vulnerable she felt at that moment.

Claremont's mouth curved into a smile, but if he meant it to inspire trust or reassurance, he failed utterly. It served only to reveal something disturbingly predatory in his features.

"Hello, little one."

Battling the mad urge to spin on her heel and flee, "little one" swallowed hard and wondered how three short words could evince so much cruelty. The earlier shiver down her back gave a repeat performance. She dragged a fist across her nose and snuffled, her own return smile shy and unsteady. "Are you an angel?" she asked, letting wonderment tinge her voice.

His shark's grin widened, emphasizing the chill in his eyes and forcing her to suppress another shudder. At his side, Lennox let out a coarse laugh, black beady eyes lingering over her tiny frame.

_Damn pervert. Shit shit SHIT! Screw kicking his arse, I'm going to kill Remus bloody Lupin. Right. Calm down. Think about this. Something's wrong here. Why are these two bothering with a Muggle child, anyway? It doesn't make any sense._

"So, little one," the false angel cut into her thoughts, his voice honey-smooth but with an underlying menace that hung in the air between them. "Can you answer me a question?"

"Um, well…" She casually linked her hands behind her back and looked down at one foot as it scuffed the grass, praying they would dismiss the flush on her face as embarrassment. Effectively hidden now, she clenched her fingers, refusing to wince as the nails bit viciously into her palms. The pain cleared her head somewhat. Fear was a luxury she couldn't afford right now. The mission was shot for the moment, no sense in trying to deny it, but there was a good chance she might get away without betraying what she was, double back and pick up their trail in another guise. She had to at make the attempt at least, and she needed to be able to think straight in order to do it.

_You're an Auror, you've been trained to handle situations like this, and damned if you're going to let all rational thought fly out the window just because you've got to handle this mess by yourself. Ten minutes ago you were saying that you didn't even need backup. Moody's going to have a heyday with this._

"My mum said not to talk too much to strangers." She peered up through her curls in what she hoped was coy naiveté.

"Your mother sounds like a wise woman. Still, would she tell you not to help someone in need? Even angels need directions now and then."

The words dripped sweetly off his tongue, and she thanked the Fates that she was not in fact the child she appeared to be. No child would have been able to resist such charm, too young to sense the poison drowning in so much honey.

"You want directions, mister?"

"Oh, yes—you see, I'm looking for a friend and I'm not sure where he lives. You may have seen him around here, though," he purred.

The nagging feeling that something was wrong exploded into a sure knowledge of the same. It was ridiculous to think that they would come to such a place without knowing exactly where they were going, so why put up such a show?

She needed to get out of there.

Shrugging her thin shoulders, she swung a leg backward and shifted her weight, putting just a little more space between herself and the two men staring at her with such unsettling intensity.

"We just moved here. I don't know anybody yet." Her eyes widened. "Oh, wait, I know! I'll go get my mum and she can help you!" Pearly teeth gleamed as she grinned, her wide smile as guileless as her blue eyes. One foot took another delicate step backward.

It was unnerving, the way his eyes were glittering in the sunlight, but Claremont made no attempt to stop her. Encouraged, she turned and began to skip away, an almost overwhelming sense of relief threatening to sap her limbs of strength as she aimed for a house across the park. Toys left on the front steps heralded the presence of children, and she might safely walk around the house to the yard in the back without suspicion.

She chanced a swift glance over one shoulder. The two men might have been statues, silently, motionlessly tracking her progress. The blanketing relief that had settled over her was abruptly yanked away to leave her shivering in fear once more. Instinct kicked her in the guts and screamed out a single word into her mind.

_RUN!_

Her head whipped forward again as she gathered herself to take flight, but no more than a single desperate stride was allowed before her legs were cut out from under her. She landed heavily in the dirt, paralyzed from the waist down and winded from the fall. Bruised, shaking, she raised herself onto her elbows and tried to crawl forward, though common sense told her it was useless. Already the ground behind her shook with the deliberate, heavy tread of booted feet as the Death Eaters approached. They must be enjoying this, witnessing her so helpless on the ground.

_No! I can't let this happen!_She desperately scanned the surrounding area, hoping to see someone, anyone, who might notice what was happening in the park and think it worth coming over to investigate. Her heart sank even as she searched for her imaginary, would-be saviour. None of this would look at all suspicious to an outside observer, she realized. Claremont had made no move on her that any Muggle could see. Anyone watching would have seen her blithely skipping across the park, only to trip and fall many feet away from the pair of men. No one could know that it was one of them who had jinxed her from behind. It was perfectly natural that the two would then come over to assist her, which surely must have been Claremont's intent.

_Mad-Eye will kill me for being so thick. _She swallowed hard._ I hope he gets the chance to try._

A second thought followed swiftly, hitting her like an oncoming train and nearly crushing her under the weight of it: these men would not hesitate to strike out at anyone who ventured near, she knew that now. Calling the attention of any passing Muggle would be tantamount to serving them a death sentence. She couldn't bring herself to do it.

She had to let them take her without a struggle.

Behind her, the muted sound of boots on the grass had fallen silent.

"Little one, you really should be more careful." Claremont's voice wrapped itself around her, its silken tone sheathing the deadly significance of his words. He knelt beside her and pulled her upright, supporting her small body since her unresponsive legs hung useless beneath her. "It appears that you cannot walk, child." He picked her up, cradling her against him in a travesty of an embrace. "Here, let me help you."

She bit her lip to contain an altogether unexpected whimper of fear. Whatever twisted desires she had seen gleaming in Lennox's eyes were nothing compared to the promise of torment burning within Claremont's.

As her thoughts spun wildly in her head, one in particular shouted over the top of all the others. It still made no sense. None of this made sense. Why go to all this trouble to snatch a Muggle child? There seemed little gain in it, not unless...

She glanced up at Claremont and asked in a small voice, "Where are we going? Are you taking me home now?"

She felt the low rumble in his chest as he broke into quiet laughter, a terrifying, evil sound that whispered of death.

He smiled down at the small captive in his arms and slowly stroked one cheek, laughing again as she shuddered away from his fingers, unable to keep up the childish façade as her imagination unwillingly pictured what those same fingers might do to her if escape became impossible.

Claremont bent his head slowly and whispered into her ear, sweeping even those frightening images away in a flood of shock and terror.

"Oh, not yet. There's something I need to show you first, my dear Nymphadora."


	2. Vulnerable

The sun had burned through the haze of clouds and set London's streets to shimmering in the heat. Only in the maze of narrow alleyways that ran between the buildings could one find any remains of the early morning cool, but the tradeoff was a dank grime that assaulted the nose and shoes of anyone so unfortunate as to choose to wander in. Rubbish lay scattered in heaps and drifts, pawed through by a small army of scavengers too intent upon survival to pay heed to much beyond finding their next meal.

A _crack_cut through the stealthy rustling in one miserable alley, scattering a handful of rats into the nearest drains. The cause of their retreat glanced around his filthy surroundings, quickly ascertaining that none of the eyes peering out at him from the piles of refuse were human. His nostrils flared in disgust at the stink and he quickly picked his way out toward the street, pausing to peer through the bars of the iron gate that separated the narrower alleyway from the wider road beyond. He took a moment to flick a cautious eye over the immediate environs before he quietly pushed open the gate, slipping out from the shadows into the bright embrace of sunlit sidewalk.

His destination lay several blocks away, but protocol demanded that he approach the spot more circumspectly than via direct Apparation, and so he was forced to walk through the blazing streets on his way to what Sirius had jokingly referred to as a play date.

He had to admit that this was one of the more nonsensical missions to which he had ever been assigned, and certainly the oddest partner. She came highly recommended by Alastor and Kingsley, and having read through her file when she had first joined the Order a few weeks back, he recalled that her list of qualifications was impressive. Still, the fact that the bulk of this mission required him to keep in contact with someone posing as a four-year-old girl made the whole situation seem a bit of a farce. It helped if he kept in mind that their targets were anything but a laughing matter.

The Death Eaters they'd been ordered to keep under tabs had never been officially convicted of any crimes, but Alastor's ears had pricked up the instant Kingsley had mentioned their names in his report. The two men had proceeded to get into an argument over assigning an additional Order member, Moody insistent that the pair was too dangerous to risk anyone else but himself, who had fought them both before, but a sudden lead on Voldemort in northern England had made it necessary to hand this mission off to the only other Order member who was both available and familiar with the Death Eaters in question, namely, Lupin himself.

So, here Lupin was, nearly to the intersection where he would catch his first glimpse of this girl, this Auror, Nymphadora Tonks.

Odd that she was related to Sirius. Would she have the same Black arrogance? The same cynical, biting sense of humor? The same unconscious grace that Sirius had retained, even after twelve years in Azkaban?

Lupin had no doubt of her loyalty or bravery; both had been amply vouched for by Moody and Dumbledore. The mere fact that she was an Auror at such a young age—how old was she again? Twenty-two? Twenty three? Ridiculously young, anyway, to have qualified for such an elite and dangerous career. It made him feel his age, though he supposed he'd been doing the same sort of work for the Order even younger than she was now—spoke all the more highly of her abilities. Not, thankfully, that he would have to witness her use of them on this mission. Never had he been gladder of the promise of a boring surveillance assignment, this last full moon having bestowed more than its usual share of exhaustion and slow-healing injuries. Trudging four blocks in the baking heat had him longing for a quiet place to sit down.

A glint of gold attracted his eye. It took a moment for his mind to adjust to the scene before him, and the corners of his mouth curled involuntarily upward as he worked out that the girl playing in the park was turning somersaults over the grass, coming to an abrupt halt under a shade tree by the simple means of running into the trunk. She shook out her tangled curls and began to pull up handfuls of grass, throwing them into the air only to have them rain back down over her hair and dress.

_Either she's a consummate actress_, he reflected, amusement at her antics widening his smile into a full-blown grin, _or she's actually enjoying herself out there_.

His leg muscles protested the forced march he had just demanded of them, and he glanced around in the hopes of finding a nearby stairwell or alley entrance in which to sit. About a third of the way down the next block was a reasonably acceptable place, which meant that the rubbish piles were slightly fewer and the buildings channeled the breeze effectively enough to lessen the smell. At least it gave him a place to rest unobserved, and a clear view of the park. He Transfigured a few pieces of discarded lumber into a crude stool and settled himself down to wait.

The faintest footfall behind him gave a split-second warning, just enough time to surge awkwardly to his feet before a wand point was shoved into his lower back.

A voice spoke, soft and deadly. "Don't move, or you and Blondie out there'll be dead before you can make it a step, understand?"

Lupin nodded almost absently, his thoughts going at a furious pace as he tried to figure out how to warn her in enough time to get away.

"Well, well," sneered the voice. "Dumbledore's pet wolf. Didn't think they'd send you here, Lupin, right after the full moon. Claremont'll be pleased to have caught you as well as that little girlie out there. Or should I say big girlie?"

An unpleasant snigger stirred the hairs on the back of Lupin's neck as his heart thudded in his chest, painful rapid beats that drowned out the menacing voice behind him for a moment. He stared helplessly at the tiny figure now swinging from a tree branch, utterly oblivious to the danger so swiftly bearing down on her.

His mind grasped desperately at some way to escape, but none of the possibilities seemed likely to work. In his present state there was every chance that he could not act quickly enough, and he held no hope that the Death Eater was bluffing in his threat to kill her outright.

Sudden pain pierced through his thoughts as his captor cast a stinging hex at his back. "I said hands away from your wand, you piece of shite! That sweet little bit in the park will be joining us soon enough, and trust me, you'll get more than an eyeful then!" Another round of low, suggestive laughter made it all the more difficult for Lupin to stand in silence, his lips barely containing the instinctive shout of warning that tore at his throat.

He slowly raised his hands, keeping his eyes fastened on the child now chasing a butterfly through the grass. The overwhelming sense of having failed her struck him just a moment before the stunning spell.

* * *

_Nymphadora. He used my name. He knows who I am._ The thought splintered like shards of glass, reflecting itself over and over in her mind. _He knows he knows he knows he knows._She'd never been the fainting type and was dismayed now to find darkness threatening to suck her down. Pull yourself together, idiot! If you give up now, you're worse than useless.

She kicked and shoved her fear to the back of her consciousness where it could whimper quietly to itself. Harder to master was the revulsion that crawled over her skin at the continued forced contact with Claremont, his arms still wrapped about her as he climbed the stairs. The block of flats they had entered lay just across the park from where she'd been playing.

Lennox set up a complaint, protesting having to walk like a damned Muggle, and Claremont took the opportunity to coldly stare her in the eye as he reminded the other Death Eater that the anti-Apparation wards in the building were of far more concern than his comfort. She mutely nodded her understanding—there would be no escape that way.

How was she going to get out of this? It would certainly help if she wasn't the size of house-elf. She played with the idea of morphing back to her natural form. If she could effect the change quickly enough, she might throw Claremont off balance and then—what? Get immediately blasted by Lennox? They had taken her wand as soon as they entered the building, and she wouldn't make it two steps without it. Then there was her clothing: what she wore fit a four-year-old body well enough, but if she morphed the clothes would never survive, and then she'd be captive and naked in front of these two maniacs. Fear traced a cold finger down her back at the thought.

The air smelled of old food and stale cigarette smoke, underlaid with faint odours that bespoke the presence of pets and unwashed humanity. When they topped the third rise of stairs, Lennox trudged to a door halfway down the corridor and traced a small design on the handle with his wand before tapping it lightly.

The door swung open and Claremont stepped in, carrying Tonks like a young bride over the threshold. She sickened at the image, realising all too well that her near future may indeed hold the terrifying mockery of a wedding night. Rape was a standard weapon in the Death Eater arsenal. Bad enough if she were in her normal form, but it would be absolute agony in her present shape.

She scanned the surroundings, mentally cataloguing everything that passed within her line of vision. Narrow entrance hall with coat hooks in the wall that had been bolted in crookedly. Living room with a dingy sofa and ancient wireless, the nicotine stained curtains pulled shut and clashing horribly with the faded grey walls. Another hallway, the light fixture broken so that it was harder to make out the loo through the first left hand doorway. A closed door on the right. Another open doorway on the left, a kitchen bearing evidence that someone here had recently indulged in whiskey. The one remaining door, across from the kitchen, was also shut.

"Banks!" Claremont called through it quietly and stepped back when it was thrown open to reveal a third man, heavily stubbled and smoking a cigarette. "Do we have another guest?"

Banks raised his left arm to take a drag, and Tonks was surprised to see no sign of a Dark Mark.

"Just like you said, but even you might be surprised who turned up." He moved out of the doorway to reveal a small, ill-lit bedroom with a bare, grimy mattress in one corner. Crumpled on the mattress was-

"Lupin," Claremont breathed out the name slowly. He stared down at the unconscious man, eyes glittering in the lamplight. Suddenly he broke into derisive laughter, his mirth causing a jolt of pain to shoot through Tonks' twisted leg as he tightened his grip. "By the Dark Lord, that's even better than I could have hoped for. You have his wand?"

Banks simply pulled the item out of his pocket and held it out. Claremont strode to the mattress and roughly tossed Tonks down beside the inert form of Remus Lupin before taking the proffered wand. Abruptly he turned back to stare at her. A smile of obscene delight wreathed itself across his face. Unwilling to contemplate the cause of his humour, she squirmed onto her stomach and instead focused on the unconscious man beside her..

_Tonks, you bleeding idiot. No wonder he didn't show up—they must have gotten him before he could contact me, and there I was so convinced that he... Fuck. I should have seen earlier that something was up._

Claremont followed her glance. "Poor Nymphadora," he mocked. "Your knight is quite unable to rescue you now, and appears in need of a bit of rescuing himself. Don't worry, little one." Once again he twisted the phrase in such a way as to make her cringe into the wall. "Our werewolf here will live to see another day, even if you do not."

Tonks turned her head to stare, uncomprehending and knowing better than to draw any comfort from his statement. If Lupin was allowed to leave, alive, then Claremont must have a reason for letting him go—but damned if she could fathom why. Frankly, she wasn't sure she wanted to understand, especially since reasoning out the meaning would require her to face the other half of the statement. With an effort she tore her eyes away from his gaze and curled up toward the wall, burying her face in her knees. It was getting harder to keep her emotions in check, and she stood no chance whatsoever if she continued to look at the Death Eater.

Vaguely registering when Claremont ordered Banks to guard the front door, she tried to focus on preparing herself mentally for whatever Claremont had planned for her. Auror training, especially where Alastor Moody was involved, always covered the possibility of torture, and running through the drills she had learned calmed her somewhat. She cast every pain-numbing spell over herself that she could call to mind, lamenting that without her wand to cast them at full power, their efficacy was severely limited.

_Better than nothing_, she reflected bitterly.

A disagreement between Lennox and Claremont refocused her attention on the pair. Lennox, from what Tonks could make out, seemed to be questioning whether or not the other man could properly control Lupin's wand. Her unease grew as the curious argument continued—there were too many reasons Claremont might use his enemy's wand, none of them good.

Something in Claremont's posture indicated that Lennox had finally pushed him too far. "Really, you imbecile," he hissed, "can you possibly be suggesting that you would do a better job? If you need the proof that badly, I'll indulge you so you'll shut up, but mark me, the Dark Lord will hear of this." He spun around to Tonks. "Flagello!"

She gasped as an invisible whip cracked over her arms and legs, instantly raising angry red welts to mark its passing. It didn't hurt nearly as much as it could have, and she briefly offered up another silent thanks to Moody's training sessions. All the same, common sense whispered that putting on a show of pain would be necessary to avoid suspicion, so she drew more tightly into herself, whimpering.

Lennox had lapsed into silence, his truculent mood shifting into an avid appreciation for every lash that carved a stripe into her fair skin. He slowly licked his lips before shuffling over to the battered table in one corner of the room to light a cigarette.

Claremont cast him a look of disgust as he terminated the spell and walked over to Lupin. "Rennervate."

Tonks watched with nervous dread as Lupin gasped into consciousness, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the dim light. She slowly uncurled and his head whipped around, pupils dilating in shock at the sight of her and their surroundings. Not daring to give him any overt sign of comfort, she instead pushed herself upright using his leg, giving it a light squeeze before pulling her hand away and wrapping her arms around her drawn-up knees.

His eyes flicked over her, taking in the scratches and dirt smears on her face, widening when they encountered the welts left after Claremont's demonstration. Something flashed in his eyes, the sudden intensity of it startling her for a moment as he slowly turned his head to face their captors.

"Hello, Claremont." When he spoke, his tone was shockingly polite, almost cordial. "Lovely to see you again, although given that I'm tied up and you're pointing my own wand at me, I'm forced to assume that you didn't invite us here for tea."

Tonks did her utmost not to gape, impressed beyond words at the brass balls of the man. To make such a flippant comment in the face of uncertain death was something she could see herself doing, but Mr. Bookworm? Where had that come from? Horrified as an unexpected grin threatened to take hold of her features, she buried her face in her arms and could only listen to Claremont's cold reply.

"Witty as ever, I see. I knew there had to be some explanation for why Dumbledore allows such a ragged excuse for a man to hang round."

Low sniggers could be heard from where Lennox sat sprawled in a chair.

Peeking over her arm, Tonks could see Lupin's jaw tighten almost imperceptibly at the barb, but he continued in that impossibly calm tone, as if he and Claremont were discussing the weather and state of the roads.

"A pity that Voldemort can't say the same for you. Dumbledore admittedly has a soft spot for wit, but your master seems to prefer the witless. Are you really so certain of the outcome here today that you've already ruled out the possibility of escape? Why do something so stupid as to leave my wand whole? Isn't that a standard rule of war: remove all usable weapons from play? Perhaps all those years of forced inactivity have made you careless."

Claremont's eyes narrowed, but Lupin deliberately ignored the warning and forged on. "And really, isn't this a bit beneath you, playing errand boy to pick up a mere girl? Or did you have a harder time than you'd expected, explaining the reasons for your life of comfort while Voldemort drifted like a spectral vagabond through Europe?"

Delicate nostrils flared as Claremont sucked in a breath, and the hand clutching Lupin's wand twitched slightly.

"Hmm, struck a nerve there, have I?" Lupin smirked. "Well, don't take it to heart—someone has to take on the tasks that those in favour can't be bothered with. Or were you upset at the bit where I implied your master is nothing more than a - "

"_Torqueo somes!_"

Lupin's wand slashed through the air and Tonks felt her arms and legs uncurling, stretching out as though ropes had suddenly pulled her taut on an invisible rack, slamming her arms against Lupin as her legs were extended toward the opposite end of the mattress. So violent was the strain on her limbs that she cried out, the pain-warding spells unable to counteract the sudden agony inflicted on hyperextended joints and shrieking muscles. Fighting a wave of unconsciousness, her eyes sought out Lupin's and latched onto his gaze as to a lifeline. A spot of blood, bright red against the pallor of her skin, bloomed on her bottom lip as she bit down to contain another scream.

* * *

**A/N: It's suspense, what can I say? I mean, other than that you might want to get used to it. The beginning chapters are one big round of cliffhangers.  
**

**Trying to find spells that show off not only the potential of the HP universe, but also exactly how nasty Voldemort and his followers can be without having to resort to the Unforgivables is a lesson in frustration. Rowling simply hasn't given us a whole lot to work with, so that leaves the fanfic writer having to take a deep breath and make up his/her own spells. I took the easy route and went with straight Latin translations for the words of the spell I wanted the character to use.**

_**Flagello**_** translates simply into "whip," and **_**Torqueo Somes **_**means, literally, "wrack the body."**


	3. Discoveries

Lupin, fully expecting blows to fall, paled when they struck not himself but Tonks. Struggling upright, he stared at her, cursing his own helplessness. A low chuckle from Claremont drew his horrified gaze away from the scene of anguish before him.

"Don't you think that the role of noble martyr is a bit clichéd, Lupin? Stop this little charade. I'm fully aware of what you hoped to do with all that ridiculous goading, so be warned then. I have no intention of physically harming you in the slightest. Push me further and all you will gain is the prolonging of her torment."

With a flick, he released the spell on Tonks and she immediately huddled into a ball, curling into the side of Lupin's leg with a muffled whimper that wrung his heart.

"Eh, now," Lennox spoke up from his dark corner, "don't get carried away. You promised me what was left of her. I expect some fun out of all of this as well."

"Oh, there will be enough of the girl's body left for your particular brand of enjoyment. Breaking the girl's mind won't hinder that," Claremont reassured him, watching intently as the blood completely drained from Lupin's face.

"What is it you want?" he asked hoarsely, willing himself to ignore the clench of fear in his gut as the full meaning of their exchange sank in.

"It's not what I want that matters, Lupin. The Dark Lord wants the girl dead, and I'm more than happy to oblige him."

"But not me."

"Why would I kill you?" Claremont slyly responded. "You're so much more useful to us alive."

"You'll find me a bit of an unwilling ally," mocked Lupin, trying to hide his confusion at the other man's comment. "The Imperius spell won't work on me."

Ice blue eyes rolled toward the ceiling. "Yes, yes, I'm quite aware of your mental faculties. For a man who's tied up, you seem oddly set on provoking me."

"And for a man who has prisoners at his mercy, you seem oddly willing to stand there and gloat."

Claremont's lips creased into the faintest of smiles. "Cannot the cat indulge in toying with the mouse? You forget that while I've been ordered to kill her, I don't see the need to do it quickly, and the longer it takes the more memories you get to carry away with you to Azkaban."

"What are you talking about?" Lupin asked quickly. The sweat that broke out across his face and back had little to do with the stifling atmosphere in the flat.

"Not so quick that you still haven't figured out your role in all of this?" Speaking slowly, Claremont's gaze bore down into Lupin's, further driving home the terrible import of his words. "Her colleagues will discover her here tomorrow, tortured to death, her body violated. Imagine their surprise when all the signs point to you. Denial will be useless. Who will believe a pathetic, poverty-stricken werewolf given the current atmosphere in the Ministry, and especially when the proof is contained within your own wand?" He twirled the offending item in his long fingers for a moment before casually pointing it at Tonks. "_Acerbus punctum!_"

Her head jerked back with a hiss as a bolt of magic hit her exposed shoulder, once, twice, three times before she cried out. A trio of closely grouped welts erupted and swelled as the sting took effect.

"The more pain she endures, the more damning it is for you. Does that answer your question, now that I've spelled it out for you in shining detail?"

Staring with unseeing eyes, his mind picturing all too well the outcome, Lupin could not deny the brutal truth: no one of influence at the Ministry would accept the word of a Dark Creature. Claremont's reasons for keeping his wand intact made clear, Lupin bitterly cursed himself for not recognizing such an obvious possibility. His earlier taunt now seemed no more than pissing into the wind.

Tonks stirred faintly against him, and he looked down to see her gaze fixed on his face, suffering still etched onto her delicate features but a surprising amount of determination showing through as well. She had plainly heard and understood Claremont's explanation, and the ruthless divulgence of her death sentence roused her from the pain. He watched as she clenched her jaw, heard her bite back a moan as she rolled up into a sitting position. Admiration took hold of him. She possessed unexpected depths of courage and strength, this woman in a child's form, able to confront even the spectres of torture and death without breaking down. He was briefly reminded of Sirius.

Slowly, carefully, she maneuvered herself around to face her tormentor. "You evil son of a bitch." Her high, piping voice and waifish appearance contrasted absurdly with the defiant words. "Dumbledore knows we're here to find you. He'll never let Lupin take the fall for this, assuming you actually manage to kill me, and believe me, that's a dangerous assumption to make." Ridiculous and empty as her threat was, somehow she managed to convey a confidence in her own abilities that made the warning seem almost believable.

Coolly staring down his tiny challenger, Claremont remained silent for a moment. He flicked a calculating gaze at Lupin and softly said, "Ah, yes, Dumbledore. Ever the wise and protective leader, I'm sure. How sad for you both to find out that your beloved mentor can make mistakes just like any other man. Or does the high and mighty Headmaster even take a personal hand in little things like assignments? Perhaps those things are left to Alastor Moody?" Tonks couldn't suppress a betraying flicker of confusion at this, and he gave her a thin-lipped smile. "Oh, now why should you be surprised at my knowing such an obvious detail? The Dark Lord is aware of many things that go on in your little Order of the Phoenix. Is Dumbledore so desperate for warm bodies that he would not realize what a prize a blood-traitor Metamorphmagus would present? Such a potential thorn in the Dark Lord's side, and yet young and inexperienced enough to be caught with relative ease, the danger extinguished along with her life.

"Either Dumbledore has ill-founded trust in your capabilities, Nymphadora, or he was foolish enough to believe you to be in no danger. Do you know, all the trouble I went through to arrange this little meeting was worth being able to witness the fear in your eyes outside, the hopelessness as you knew yourself to be irrevocably trapped. What surprised me was how quickly you resigned yourself. Really, it was as if you didn't expect your comrade to come to the rescue. You jerked in my arms when I carried you in and discovered that he was here. Had you so little faith in the werewolf that it hadn't occurred to you that perhaps he was in danger, that he too had fallen?"

Lupin turned his head to look sharply at the girl sitting by his feet. His eyebrows slowly drew together into a frown as he witnessed the flush of blood along her neck and ears, the only part of her head that he could see as she stared at Claremont, who had all too apparently scored a hit. She had thought him capable of such a thing?

Humiliation warred with a certain amount of resignation as he realized that, without ever having exchanged a single word with the woman, her opinion of him was set. He thought he knew why.

* * *

Try as she might, Tonks could not suppress the incriminating evidence that her body was providing to every eye in the room. She was every bit as guilty as Claremont had implied. Damn that man and his slippery little mind. She bit back a frustrated sigh. How were they to find a way out when he seemed to have all possible ways blocked already? If he'd only show some obvious weakness to exploit, she'd jump on it in a second, but so far his only weakness seemed to be a nauseating tendency to stroke his own ego.

Besides, even if he did make a mistake, would she and Lupin be able to react quickly enough? And now, with Claremont openly undermining Lupin's trust in her, she doubted their ability to work well as a unit.

She twisted round, intending to give him some sign of apology, unsure of why her conscience prompted her to do such a thing at such a moment as this, simply knowing that she didn't want to shove off with his last memory of her on this earth associated with hurt and disappointment. Lupin's eyes were fixed on the mattress between them; she got the distinct impression that he was refusing to look at her. She'd just moved to touch his leg when Claremont's voice rang out.

"_Petrificus Totalus!_"

Lupin looked up, startled, to see her frozen in place, hand outstretched and staring at him in alarm. She watched as vague emotions rippled over his features – confusion, anger, disappointment – before he closed his face up like a book and turned to look over her shoulder at the figure beyond.

"Come now, Nymphadora, sympathy for the werewolf?" A sneer twisted its way across Claremont's face, disdain practically dripping from every word that fell from his lips. "Half-breeds like him require no such handling. I quite understand your natural inclination to doubt his reliability, filthy mongrel that he is."

"It's not going to work." Lupin spoke up unexpectedly, his voice barely above a hoarse whisper as he continued to stare up at the Death Eater.

Claremont raised an elegantly curved eyebrow while he regarded the weary-eyed man in front of him. "Really, Lupin, you're bringing out the full arsenal today, aren't you? Feeble witticisms, taunts and now this rather enigmatic statement; it all suggests that you actually imagine yourself to have some measure of control over your situation. What next? Threats? Promises of terrible retribution? As long as you're going to make yourself ridiculous, you might as well go all out."

Silence filled the room as their eyes locked together. Tonks watched the battle of wills fiercely waged between the two, not even broken when Lupin spoke again, although he drew a deep breath beforehand as if to steady his composure.

"For whatever reason you feel the need to destroy everything you touch, even down to tiny details like my faith in a fellow Order member, I want you to know that it won't work." He shifted that formidable gaze to Tonks, scrutinising her face, and she found herself blushing again, though she would have been hard pressed to explain why. "I would not blame her for an inherent distrust in me, given what I am and the fact that she has no personal knowledge of my character, having only met me for the first time in this room."

If this admission startled Claremont, his impassive expression showed none of it.

Lupin continued. "I know that you're going to try and kill her, but damned if I'll let you make her believe that she's alone as she dies, that I've given up on her. I know as little of her as she knows of me, but my loyalty and respect aren't easily tossed aside, and she's earned those already simply through her own allegiance to Dumbledore."

Tonks stared at him, understanding dawning as these soft-spoken words flowed over her. Claremont wasn't trying to hurt Lupin, not directly anyway – those earlier poisonous remarks were all aimed at her, barbs meant to cut her, weaken her defenses. Her resolve hardened. That bastard would find out in short order just how easy it was to break her.

In the meantime, she had to try and remove the wedge that Claremont had so deftly shoved between Lupin and herself. She tried to lean forward, wanting to give him a sign of reassurance, and abruptly came up short against the invisible bonds of the spell.

Somehow she'd forgotten the body bind, and its presence infuriated her.

On a sudden impulse, she slowly began to shrink herself. Maybe she could gain a tiny bit of movement within the spell; after a few moments, she tried to wiggle her fingers. Nothing. Desperation overcame disappointment, and she forced her mind to dredge up whatever it could on the Petrificus spell. Common teaching held it to be inescapable from the inside without a wand, but she had proven in the past that for a Metamorph, the usual rules didn't necessarily apply. What if she tried the opposite tack?

With excruciating slowness she began to gradually swell her proportions, keeping one eye on Lupin to see if he marked the changes. They couldn't be noticeable or she'd get caught, but perhaps just a bit of growth would be enough to push the bounds of the spell. She kept it up until she thought her lungs would burst from the pressure.

Perhaps if she just tried one limb... The arm that wasn't outstretched toward Remus was conveniently hidden from the Death Eaters' view by the rest of her body—safer to try that first. She focused her power and tried again.

* * *

Lupin drew another deep breath after his short speech, wondering why he was making such an effort to emotionally shield the person who had so easily dismissed him as untrustworthy. It was probably a waste of time, but he'd meant what he said. Even if she fully believed him to be the unreliable half-breed that Claremont claimed, still he would do his best to take some of the burden from her. He owed that much to Sirius and Dumbledore, and he even found it possible to absolve her of her misconceptions regarding himself. After all, she was still so young; experience would teach her the danger of buying into stereotypes.

He lost himself in thought, unaware that he was being closely observed. Claremont bore the look of an avid collector who had just come across a rare specimen of insect, his eyes fixed on his prey in fascination.

"I admit myself baffled, Lupin. You have every reason to keep these noble tendencies to yourself. You're not doing her any favours by testing my patience, and it is foolish to hope that you can bolster her will enough to withstand me. You know what I am capable of, and all the Auror training in the world will do her no good. In the end, I will break her, and you will be forced to witness every second.

So why these futile speeches? Can you possibly be trying to win her more time? It won't help—fear is even now working against the both of you. Look at her. I don't even need to see her face to know that the anticipation of pain is wearing her down." Claremont stared at the sweat slowly trickling down the back Tonk's neck, and a frightening hunger burned deep within his eyes.

Lupin felt his stomach clench in revulsion. His eyes were drawn back to the pain-wracked face of the girl staring at him with such pleading intensity, but looking at her was a mistake. He regretted the action immediately, unable to stop his memory when it conjured up pictures of Claremont's past victims. During the first war, while the man had not been among the more prolific of Voldemort's inner circle of killers, he was easily as sadistic as he was clever, and the evidence left at the sites of his murders left no doubt that his chosen victims could expect to die in terrible pain.

Ever-increasing waves of nausea rolled over Lupin, carrying with them a generous measure of guilt; she would have received a more merciful ending if he had not been there, if he was not what he was. He gritted his teeth against the sudden urge to retch, his impotence mocking him as he lay bound on the mattress beside her. Fighting down the slow roil in his gut, a tiny twinkle of light beside him pulled his attention from the macabre images that filled his head.

Focusing more carefully on her pale and bloodied face, he saw a tear slowly tracing a path through the grime that coated one cheek. It struck him with a sudden force that something was out of place—there was no reason for the amount of suffering he could read in her eyes at this moment. The only spell currently on her was a body-bind; paralyzation shouldn't hurt, certainly not enough to bring tears. Had Claremont done something else that would only now be manifesting itself? What was happening to her?

Studying her body as minutely as he could without drawing the Death Eaters' attention, he looked her over, finally taking in the arm that lay at such an odd angle in her lap. It took every ounce of willpower he possessed not to react to the sight which met his disbelieving eyes.

Her fingers were moving.

* * *

**A/N: No complaints about cliffies this time – any pain Tonks is currently suffering is all self-inflicted. "The good of the many..." and all that, even if the "many" in this case consists of two people.**

_**Acerbus Punctum**_** translates to "bitter sting."**


	4. Overcome

"_Don't stare!_" the irritated jerk of her hand unmistakably warned, jolting Lupin out of his shock long enough to shift his disbelieving gaze away. If the earth had stood still on its axis, or rain suddenly fell upward, it might have been more believable than the evidence his own eyes provided. No one just broke through Petrificus Totalus. No one. Who was this woman?

And, of more immediate concern, how was she supposed to continue doing what she was doing without attracting any attention?

A furtive glance provided enough information to fill his belly with a queasy mixture of relief and disquiet—neither man seemed to have noticed anything out of place, but both of them were eyeing their smaller victim up and down with an intensity that spoke of... Lupin shut off his thoughts abruptly, noting with disgust that Lennox was slowly running a bloated tongue over his lips. An unreasoning desire to drive the man's teeth out the back of his throat made Lupin grit his own. At least Tonks was facing the other direction and didn't have to see the blatant display.

So, for the moment at least, they remained ignorant of her little discovery.

_It doesn't say much for our situation that I can feel grateful for such a pathetically small favour. What are the chances she'll be put in a position where she can use it to our advantage?_

He looked back at her, to where the shining drop that had caught his attention earlier was followed by several others, trailing downward one by one to drip off her chin and onto the stained front of her dress. The sight of those tears, the woebegone state of the child's face she wore, they were beginning to affect him too much. He forced himself to keep in mind that she was no child. It wasn't a little girl about to be tortured to death. Not that witnessing the torture of a grown woman made for better circumstances at all...

He wanted to know what her real face looked like. How else could he dissociate who she was from the child that she seemed to be? Every protective instinct he possessed had responded unconsciously to her high-pitched, helpless cries; had raged against Claremont's cool sadism and the overt lasciviousness of Lennox; and now he couldn't think straight, couldn't think past the gut need to protect her. Neither of them would be helped by this sudden and inexplicable tendency to turn knight errant.

No, he realised uneasily. A knight errant wouldn't be so bad, but the truth was a little more sinister than that.

Every protective instinct.

A few times, less than a handful in his whole life, the tainted piece of his psyche that comprised the wolf had roused, reacted to an outside influence even while his human consciousness held sway. Outside of the days immediately surrounding the full moon, it was buried too far away to be reached, thankfully, forced to sleep out its term of imprisonment. Something was happening now to make it mutter fitfully in its slumber. A low, whining growl echoed through the chambers of his mind, emerging far too close to the surface for comfort.

Mentally bracing himself, he pushed against that other presence, driving it down until the vague grumbling receded back into the dark depths of his unconsciousness. The effort left him shaking, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat, and now as he looked at her, his eyes held a glint of fear, not only for her, but toward her as well. Anyone who could do that to him was dangerous, ally or not. He would take care to avoid her in the future...if they lived long enough to have futures.

Thoughts like that were irrelevant now, though; they still had to find a way out, and there was little chance that would happen if he couldn't bring himself under better control.

Her eyes, he saw now, spoke less of pain than they had earlier, in spite of the fact that she'd paid a price to free her hand. The little finger was red and angry, curled unnaturally away from the others at the second joint. Clearly broken, yet she continued to manipulate all five digits as she painstakingly forced more of her arm out of its captivity.

Whatever faults she might have, there was no denying her courage or quick wits, and perhaps that would be enough to get them out of there. It would have to be. There was little to no chance that he could wandlessly sever his ropes, and although his hands were free from just above the wrist—he twisted them experimentally to get an idea as to just how much movement was possible—there wasn't a thing he could do with the rest of his body trussed up.

His heart, raised so high by the sight of her moving fingers, sank back down to the pit of his stomach. What could they possibly accomplish with nothing more formidable than three empty hands?

Perhaps given more time, she could perform further miracles. It was just so damn frustrating to have to sit there and wait for the Death Eaters to make a move.

The only noises in the room came from the quiet and competing rhythms of four sets of lungs. Lupin frowned and began to wonder what Claremont was playing at. The man had done almost nothing but soliloquize; the silence that now fell over the group was disquieting.

What was he waiting for?

From the corner of the room came an unexpected sigh and a muttered, "Hell with this. It's been nothing but bleeding staring matches and trading insults with that wanking half-breed! I'm off to get a drink."

An almost imperceptible smile flickered across Claremont's face as he tore his eyes away from Tonks' sweat-soaked hair and glanced back over his shoulder. "By all means. Why stay and watch something as boring as the slow mental breakdown of a powerful adversary when there's a full bottle of whiskey to be had?"

Lennox scowled at his partner's back. Just bright enough to catch the mockery in the other man's voice, he seemed to bridle at the implied insult, loath to lose face in front of their prisoners; when Claremont turned to face him and gestured toward the door, however, he proved either unwilling or unable to resist both the disarming smile and the lure of a stiff drink. He surged to his feet and strode out, Claremont following as far as the doorway to call out for Banks.

Lupin lost no time in taking advantage of the distraction. His fingernails scratched gently on the grubby mattress cover and saw Tonks' eyes brighten slightly in response. He mouthed, "Are you okay?"

Her free hand made a vague gesture, indicating neither yes or no. She then pointed to the ropes wrapped around him and made a cutting motion with two fingers.

He shook his head briefly. Claremont was speaking quietly to Banks, and so Lupin chanced leaning in toward her. Whispering close to her ear, so low that he could barely hear himself speak, he asked, "Can you get any more of yourself free?"

She indicated her uncertainty by sweeping her hand upward in a questioning gesture and dropping it down again.

Another glance at the door while he quickly considered what next to say. There was no time to mince words. "He'll draw this out as long as he can. The torture will only get worse." She tightened her hand into a fist, but Lupin saw that it trembled visibly for all of its defiance. "If the chance arises, we'll have to jump on it. Stay strong, alright?"

She crossed her fingers, and the smile held within the blue depths of her eyes was like a single ray of sunshine piercing down through the bars of a prison cell window—it brought hope at a time when by all rights, hope should have long since faded.

How could she possibly be so untouched by what had been done to her, by what might still happen? Guilt welled up inside his chest. Strength. It was easy for him to talk of being strong, leading her to believe that she could withstand Claremont. Would she have enough? Would he, even with the torment that he experienced every full moon? After all, she didn't know what she was up against, she couldn't...but he did.

Gods. Enough had been left of Claremont's victims from the last war to make Lupin all too knowledgeable about the ways and means of their deaths.

He took a breath, hoping she didn't hear how it struggled to get past the knot tightening in his chest. "Try to keep eye contact with me. It will help if you can focus outside yourself when they-" He stopped, not wanting to finish the sentence. "If we can't get out of here, they're going to hurt you, and I can't...I won't be able to stop them, but I promise, I won't let them-" He swallowed down a lump of something that felt too much like fear. There was no way these half-sentences could be helping her fight back her own. "I won't let you die here."

All that could be done now was to hope that she put more faith in his own words than he did himself.

There was a pause in the conversation at the door, and Lupin hurriedly sat back again. Claremont stepped back and quietly shut the door. There was an ominous sense of finality following the sound of the latch clicking shut, a warning that nothing now stood between them and the evil embodied in the lone man turning to regard them. The disquieting smile that had crossed Claremont's face upon Lennox's defection to the kitchen returned in full force, confirming Lupin's vague fears: their captor looked altogether too satisfied for Lupin to believe anything other than that the removal of the second Death Eater had been Claremont's ultimate goal, the principal reason behind the word games and odd silences.

Lupin was left to wonder if Lennox could even appreciate the irony of the situation, that his presence had actually acted as a buffer between Claremont and the prisoners. As long as he remained, waiting hopefully for some titillation as a dog waits for table scraps, the worst would never happen—Lupin could only presume that Claremont wasn't the sort to share certain spells or the full enjoyment of his labours. Whatever he was so jealously guarding from his partner was a question that Lupin didn't want to contemplate. It was disturbing enough to know that Claremont had held himself in check, tolerating even his prisoners' defiant speeches, until Lennox's impatience had predictably come to the fore and the man had gone off to indulge in the more immediate gratification that stood on the kitchen table. It was as clear as the sky outside, though, that whatever restraint Claremont had been exercising had been cast aside.

* * *

Tonks tried to make some sense out of her strange, all-too-brief exchange with Lupin. She knew he had tried to be reassuring, but it sure as hell didn't come out that way. She watched him sink back into the mattress and then returned to working more of her arm out of the Petrificus bonds, taking her mind off the conversation, thankful that the magic stifled the mewls of pain she could feel trying to make themselves heard as the cracked bones in her finger ground together. She'd felt it snap just before her hand had perforated the fabric of the spell, but at least some measure of mobility had been gained, despite the injury; now she just needed to figure out the next best step.

The door shut, and footsteps, presumably Claremont's, fell softly on the rug. She had only a few seconds to register the look in Lupin's eyes as they focused behind her, widening with an emotion that read altogether too much like fear, and she wondered what in their enemy's expression would make him react in such a way.

A finger slipped under the back collar of her dress, against her spine. "Skin holds such possibilities, does it not?" The low murmur in her ear was somehow more of a violation than his hands on her body. "Like a blank canvas, just begging for an artist to work upon it." She felt the thin cotton material sliced away by a whispered Severing charm, felt as his breath struck her skin when the fabric was drawn to her sides and her back was laid bare.

Brave intentions turned tail and fled, leaving her to stand alone, unprotected, against whatever was about to happen. She tried to refocus on Lupin, understanding now why he'd told her to hold eye contact. His steady gaze told her all that she needed and wanted to hear, even though he couldn't speak the words aloud: she wouldn't go through this alone, he would stay with her, he wouldn't let them break her. Please, let him be right!

The meeting of their gazes strengthened her will for a few precious moments, but her resistance was slowly leeched away by the touch of those hated fingers: Claremont had begun to trace patterns over her exposed flesh. Not his finger, she suddenly realized. His wand. He was drawing something on her back with the wand tip, its movement agonizingly slow and deliberate, every brush leaving behind a tingle of magic on her skin.

He had drawn a little away from her to focus on his handiwork, and so his breath no longer forced itself, hot and suggestive, over her ear and down her neck, but she could still hear it, audibly quickening in excitement as the spellwork progressed.

Anger surged up within her chest as she listened, and she wanted to curse her own emotion; would have, since it sapped away valuable energy, had it not been for the simple blessing that onrushing tide of wrath brought along: it washed away fear and buoyed up her courage.  
_  
When I get free from this, I swear I'll make sure you never hurt anyone again_, she vowed, clenching her fist until the nails brought blood. _I'll kill you with my bare hands if I have to._

In the fierce roil of emotion, she barely registered that Claremont had finished, almost didn't catch the words that he incanted upon the symbols he'd placed on her back.

"_Viscus Perussi!_"

Lupin jerked upright. "No!"

The protest sounded as though it had been ripped out of him, and he began to fight violently against the restraining ropes, glaring at Claremont with eyes blazing with wrath and horror and frustration.

His efforts left him panting and flushed, and Tonks felt confusion mingling in with the anger still seething inside her chest. The words of the spell meant nothing to her; she'd never come across even the mention of it in the course of her schooling and Auror training. Lupin's reaction made it abundantly clear, though, that she was facing something truly terrible.

So why did she feel nothing? Even the subtle prickling of the magic as it seeped into her skin had faded, leaving behind a feeling of disquiet, as if she were resting in the eye of a storm.

"Such melodrama from a reputedly calm man." Claremont was purring in satisfaction. "I confess myself disappointed, Lupin. I learned that spell from the Dark Lord himself, shared it with none but my victims, and here you know it already. " He reached down to run his fingers through her curls. "You must also know, then, that it will take many hours for the spell to kill her. There's no call to worry over that little detail—it won't, in fact, kill her at all. I've something much better planned long before it gets to that stage."

Lupin's response was lost to her. A strange tickling sensation was beginning to run over the path Claremont's wand had traced, and Tonks felt her body trying to shiver.

_...hours for the spell to kill her?_

The tickling strengthened to an irritating itch, and her free hand involuntarily twitched with the desire to reach back and scratch at it.

The two men had fallen silent, both watching her now. Lupin, with some apparent knowledge of the spell's workings, had painted on his face a dismaying picture of horrified compassion—she knew he could see that it had started to take effect. He was helpless to do anything about it, and they both knew it. Still, she couldn't stop the mental pleading that he do something, anything, to save her from what was coming.

The itch was unbearable, just short of becoming painful, and then suddenly...it disappeared. For several glorious seconds Tonks let herself believe that the spell had gone wrong, that despite all the buildup it had merely fizzled out like a bad firework.

A microsecond of warning was all she was given before it flared back to life.

Fire.

Terrible. Unforgiving. Devouring.

It burrowed down beneath the surface of her skin until she could feel herself choking on wordless screams. Thought, emotion, even her breath, were crushed beneath the onslaught of such burning torment. How could anyone live through this? How long until she wasn't begging Lupin to save her, but to kill her instead?

Lupin. He swam in her vision as her eyes clung desperately to his, even through the torrent of tears that flooded up and threatened to blot out his face from her sight altogether. For that reason alone she made an inhuman effort to control the pain, or at least her reaction to it. His eyes, at this moment the most beautiful things in this godforsaken place, her only link to sanity, to escape, to life—she couldn't lose hold of them, or she truly would be lost.

It came as the darkest moment of her life, then, when she felt Claremont's hands on her shoulders, turning her inexorably away from the refuge of Lupin's steadfast gaze to face instead the icy hell contained within her torturer's eyes. They gleamed with twisted amusement, showing all too well that he knew what he was depriving her of. The tears she had been holding back were now given rein to flow freely, to block out that madman's face. He couldn't stop her from crying. And flow they did. His touch has intensified the agony inflicted on her back, making her vision fill with floating spots of light.

She barely registered Lupin's gasp as her wounds were turned to his view, followed quickly by Claremont's voice as it practically sang out an incantation.

"_Aspicio!_"

An agonized grunt told how hard Lupin fought against the spell, just as the Death Eater's soft, malicious laughter told how utterly he had failed. "I told you, cur, you will watch; I wouldn't want you to miss any of this. Why, we've barely begun—these are only her outer decorations, after all."

The swimming lights increased. Just as in the corridor outside the flat, faintness threatened to overwhelm her, and a large part of her desperately wanted to submit, to be free of the pain. The tiny corner of her mind that remained clearheaded resolutely repulsed the idea, however, forcing the rest of her conscious mind to admit that Claremont would simply revive her again. Somehow she found the strength to deny him that little satisfaction.

He reached around to the back of her neck and grasped a handful of golden hair, dragging her head back, forcing her to incline slightly backward toward Lupin. Caught in the grip of the Petrificus, her stiffened muscles protested the movement.

Through the blurry film that obscured her eyesight, she made out the shape of a wand descending toward her and felt once more the tracing of symbols, starting at her chin and descending downward over her neck and collarbones to the edge of her sundress. He paused, and it took a moment for her pain-befuddled thoughts to realize why. The hand holding the wand lay on her waist, while the other reached for the top of her dress.

In a dizzying flash of clarity, she saw both his intention and their means of escape, and without hesitation leapt to take advantage. It took one ages-long moment to lengthen her hand and then she was striking upward, feeling the crackle of bone as she snatched at the wand so negligently dangled in front of her. Her fingers gripped the end of it, and while Claremont gaped at the unexpected movement, she was able to pull it almost entirely from his slackened grasp. His fingers scrabbled forward in desperation to catch the very tip of the handle, but she tightened her hold, and abruptly it slipped away from him. The sudden lack of resistance made her hard-won prize flip out of her own hand to go spinning wildly over her shoulder toward Lupin.

Claremont's eyes flashed, his furious gaze deadly, but he made the mistake of hesitating. In that second of indecision, while she knew he was asking himself whether he should go after Lupin's wand or fumble for one of the others stuck in his belt, her hand struck out once more. She clamped onto his wrist with adrenaline-fueled strength, giving Lupin a few more invaluable seconds with which to purchase a miracle. She focused all her attention on keeping hold of the hand that had so recently tormented her, knowing she would pay for the interference, knowing that it was a price worth paying.

He struggled against her grip, cursing her while his other hand yanked her head back painfully, nearly snapping her neck, but she clung to him like Devil's Snare. Abruptly she felt him using her own attack against her, pushing forward with the hand she clutched, forcing her down. Her body shrieked its silent anguish as the tortured skin on her back was ground into the mattress, swamping her senses with so much pain that she never felt his other hand release its hold on her hair, never saw as it clenched itself into a fist, utterly failed to see it descend toward her. The blow crashed into her cheek and nose with the force of a hammer.

The darkness that had courted her so assiduously for the last hour now refused to be kept away any longer, enclosing her in its shadowy embrace swiftly and without mercy. Her last fleeting thought was one of regret: she hadn't been able to say goodbye to Lupin.

* * *

**A/N: **_**Viscus Perussi**_**, literally translated, means "flesh consumed." **_**Aspicio**_**, if I've translated correctly, means "Watch!"**


	5. Every Tick of the Clock, Part 1

******ETA May 2011: This chapter has been altered from the original in that it's been split into two parts. It was just too damned long the way it was, in comparison to the length of other chapters********.**  


* * *

Strange how suddenly the little details could become larger than life. The subtle whine of the wand as it spun through the air. The dead white of her skin. The sting of sweat in his eyes and bite of the ropes across his arms and legs. The smell of blood and cigarettes and fear. And slicing through everything else came the terrible, unforgiving awareness of a clock ticking in the back of his mind. As improbable as it seemed, time was now their greatest enemy.

Almost without thought, Lupin groped toward the slim bit of wood that had landed so tantalizingly close to his fingers, dimly aware that Tonks and Claremont were still grappling next to him. Intellect proved slower than reflex in this instance; his hand closed over the prize before his brain had quite caught up or fully wrapped itself around the fact that the hoped-for miracle had come about.

She'd done it. His spirits were carried up and along in a rush and, despite the horror of the situation, he could almost have laughed. She'd actually done it! He glanced up again to see Claremont's fist descending on her, and the impulse toward laughter vanished as quickly as it had come. There came the sound of impact, a sickening snap of bone made even more terrible by the fact that her head barely moved under the hit, nor did her eyes close, though she couldn't possibly have remained conscious after such a blow.

The Death Eater's face was aflame with hate and fury, and he stared down at the limp form below him as though he wanted to rend her limbs apart. Lupin understood the feeling all too well—he wanted to do precisely the same to the man himself just now, but he forced his mind away from such thoughts. No time, no time, just a few more seconds and Claremont's attention would shift...

Fingers fumbled with the wand, struggling to flip it over and grip it properly, but then Claremont's eyes were snapping upward, he was striking out with all swiftness of a viper—there was nothing Lupin could do but take a shot and hope it went home.

"_Stupefy!_"

It hit off center but proved close enough. The red bolt caught Claremont's shoulder as he lunged forward and he went down like a felled tree, his momentum casting him across both of his captives. The springs of the mattress beneath them groaned as loudly in protest as Lupin would have liked to.

His body begged him to consider sitting for a moment, to rest and enjoy this small victory long enough to catch his breath, but Tonks was buried under Claremont, and God only knew if she could breathe. Lupin banished his ropes, and though his limbs felt as though they had lead weights attached to them and were in an agony of pins and needles, he managed to heave the unconscious man away, dumping his dead weight unceremoniously over the edge of the mattress and onto the filthy floor where, Lupin thought, he rather belonged. The flare of light from a Body-Bind spell erupted from his wand before the Death Eater's body had even stopped rolling.

"Let's see you wriggle your way out of that, you son of a bitch," he whispered. Had there been less to worry about, had there been any opportunity for such reflections, no doubt he would have been dismayed by this rising urge to hurt his captor. Not turn him over to the Aurors. Not even kill him. Just...hurt him. When this was all over guilt would settle in—violence, even necessary violence, was something he avoided if he could—but for now there was only anger, a desire for vengeance against this man who could take such vile pleasure in hurting the innocent. It was all Lupin could do to not raise his wand again and–

His eyes were drawn abruptly to a glistening stain of red on the front of Claremont's otherwise pristine dress shirt.

_No_. He twisted back around to Tonks with his heart in his throat, ignoring the protest of his body. Blood, too much blood, all over her face and chest, streaming out of her broken nose. _No no no no no..._

Nearly dropping the wand in his haste, he released the Petrificus spell—her eyelids fell like stones the second he'd done it—and slid his hand gently under her thin shoulders, trying not to touch the horrific wounds on her back, trying not to let fear take hold as an ominous rattle began to echo up out of her lungs with every shallow breath she drew.

She felt impossibly small as he cradled her against his side, healing the fractures and siphoning out the blood from her throat and lungs as best as he could.

A thump from somewhere else in the flat sounded dully through the door, testament to how vulnerable they both were here. Claremont had locked it, hadn't he? A lock all too easily undone, though, unless the man had sealed it as well, and why should he? Claremont was arrogant enough to simply trust that his orders would be obeyed. Lupin briefly thought of sealing the door himself but dismissed the idea as too dangerous—doing that might very well draw the attention of the pair outside. He'd just have to trust that the two men were obedient little lackeys.

A few rumbles of conversation made their way into the room, each audible murmur enough to send his head whipping up along with his heart rate, but no one ever approached the door. Beween the heat and the stress, his shirt was soon wringing wet, and beads of sweat were flung from his hair and chin whenever he tossed his head.

Her body, he noticed, wasn't sweating at all anymore. Her skin felt cold and clammy when his hand brushed against it. By the time her breathing had eased, the dreadful bubbling that accompanied each rise of her chest gone, Lupin was ready to scream. And for a man who could count on one hand the number of times he'd truly wanted to do such a thing since reaching adulthood, that was perhaps a bad sign.

Her injuries were becoming far, far too many, and it was difficult not to keep a running tally in his head, committing them all to memory so that when he found Claremont again—and Lupin would find him again—pain for pain, the man would know what he'd put this young woman through.

Lupin shook his head, dismayed and angry with himself for allowing this disturbing trend in his thoughts to continue—it was clouding his judgment and endangering her at the same time. Here he claimed to want to help her, and yet he could stand over an enemy, thinking of nothing but his own need for retribution, while she lay behind him, drowning in her own blood.

_Yes, you're a real hero, Remus_. His self-mockery, caustic as it was, helped to settle his emotions, even as his fingers gingerly felt along her forehead, her cheeks, her jaw. He released a sigh of gratitude when he found nothing else broken. His vengeful impulses he pushed from his mind. Later was soon enough to deal with all of that, and if later never came, then worrying about it now was useless anyway. Enough. It was uncertain if her lungs were totally clear, she probably wasn't at all ready to be moved, but he had no choice. It was time to wake her up.

"_Evigilo_" he whispered and tapped the tip of wand gently against her forehead. And waited as the seconds ticked by, more and more anxious as she lay there unmoving in his arms, except for the slight in and out of her breathing. It shouldn't take so long for the spell to–

At the sound of her first weak cough, his jaw unclenched—he hadn't even noticed the iron tension in those muscles until he let it go—and he allowed his eyes to close in relief, only to shoot open again a second later when a second cough and then a third suddenly became a fit, and he could feel her pitifully trying to curl in on herself to relieve the pain of it. His one arm supporting her a little more firmly, he reached into a pocket with the opposite hand to grab his handkerchief.

Despite everything he'd done, somehow sitting there doing nothing but propping her up and holding a bit of cloth to her mouth made him feel appallingly helpless, as if he were winning a minor skirmish but losing ground all the same. Winning this particular battle with no loss of life sounded as far out of reach as the stars, as he knelt there trying to soothe her through the spasms that wracked her body.

Finally she was still, quiet against him except for the short, gasping breaths that seemed to be all her lungs were capable of, and while he wanted to let her rest a while longer, when weighed against the greater need of getting her to St. Mungo's, he knew the choice had already been made. They had to go.

"Nymphadora," he whispered, "can you stand? We have to get out of here."

By degrees she turned her head to stare at him, blinking without comprehension, the meaning of his words seeming to wash over her without her catching any of it. Her eyes, red-rimmed blue and sunken, struck him as frighteningly too old for her body, the pupils contracted with such pain that for a moment he wondered if she even knew he was there. He moved his hand up to touch her cheek, to get some response, and the bit of linen fell away from her mouth to the bed. Blots of red stared back up at him.

All right, forget getting a response. He was just going to have to carry her as he fought his way out. How was a detail he couldn't be bothered with, it would just have to be done. His free arm slipped under her legs and he made to pick her up, but a small hand against his wrist stilled his movements, weakly pushing him away.

"Wait," she whispered, her voice barely more than a breath of air. Startled, he strained to hear her. "Don't carry. Get wand."

"What?" he stared at her, voice hushed but no less vehement. "No! You're too weak, you can barely talk, much less fight!"

"Cast...pain spells." Her lips moved as if they objected to the task, cracked and bloodied and barely moving while she struggled to get the words out. "Do it." Her eyes were no longer clouded, but he wasn't all that comforted by the sudden, feverish brightness they'd taken on instead.

"If I do that, you might hurt yourself more. Is it worth killing yourself in the attempt?"

He found her answering gaze unsettling. "To…to get myself out? No," she gave the briefest of head shakes and winced from even that tiny motion. "But to get you out...yes. Now. Do it." Even at a whisper, the command was clear.

Lupin wasn't buying it. "You're in no position to argue with me. And I won't be responsible for your–"

One tiny hand shot out and she mewled in pain, but it didn't stop her from gripping the front of his shirt. Her speech was halting, strained. "Look. You idiot. Lennox will be back. Any minute. You need me. One of us...needs to get out. You're...in better shape." She panted for air but kept their eyes locked together, forcing the words out faster. "Otherwise I'm just a liability. Then neither of us gets out. Now fucking do it."

He wanted to argue, even went so far as to open his mouth again, but...she was right. God help him, she was right, and he did what she asked, quickly, before his conscience had the chance to override a questionable bit of logic that could very well result in her death. Her hand let go its hold on his clothes and flopped back down to her lap. The small movement reminded him of one last injury within the realm of what he could heal.

As the broken bones of her finger reset themselves and the other spells took effect, the tightness of her features, the tormented set of her shoulders eased, and she slumped against him with a long sigh. "Thank you," she said, her voice a bit louder than before and no longer choked with pain. "Where's my wand?"

"Can you sit up by yourself?"

She pushed herself up with his help and after a couple of tries was able to steady herself using both arms planted on the mattress in front of her.

Lupin watched her for a long moment, wondering why he was agreeing to this, and then stood to fetch her wand before he decided to change his mind altogether. "Which is yours?" he asked, frowning at the pair of wands stuck into Claremont's belt. Before she had a chance to answer, though, he just grabbed both and turned around to display them, one in either hand.

"One on the left," she whispered, glancing at the wand in his right palm and shuddering. "Snap that, would you?"

Dropping hers gently onto the bed beside her, he stared at Claremont's briefly and then swiftly did as she asked. The sharp splitting of wood was more than gratifying to that part of him still voting for a few swift kicks to Claremont's beautiful, white-blond head—a feeling his companion must have shared. The tiny point of her chin rose defiantly as she stared at the broken fragments lying in his palm, her eyes gone oddly dark. "Good. Here, help me up."

He was on his knees beside her before the wand pieces hit the floor in the opposite corner. "Are you sure you're all right to do this?" he couldn't help asking. Even with his help, her whole body was trembling like a leaf in a strong wind by the time she'd got to her feet. It was painfully obvious she couldn't stand without his support.

"No, I'm not sure," she gasped, stumbling into his side a second time. "Maybe it's better that I'm stuck with this size for now...shorter distance to fall. Wish it was always like that." Unbelievably, her lips twitched up into a faint shadow of a smile.

If she was making a joke, it wasn't one he understood. His hands steadied her again. "You shouldn't try to change back anyway," he warned, wondering how much time they could spare while she got her feet working under her. No time! his instincts screamed. "The spell he used on you, there's no telling what the result would be if you tried to shift right now."

She went absolutely still, an ominous sort of quiet that brought to his mind images of a hunted animal gone to ground. Disturbing especially since her muscle control was virtually nonexistent. "We'll talk about it later, right now the important thing is to–"

"You know what he did to me, then?" she cut him off, her high-pitched voice too calm. "You know what this will do to me?"

"I..." He looked at her as she stood there, beaten and bloody yet still amazingly unbroken, and found himself unwilling to lie but even more unwilling to crush her with the truth. "Yes, I know," he admitted softly. "And I know you want me to tell you, but please, I can't explain now," he insisted, almost pleading with her. "I know the counterspell, we just need to get you out of here."

"Why?"

"It will take too long, the other Death Eaters could come in at any moment, you just have to trust me that time is everything." If his words didn't convince her, hopefully the underlying urgency in his voice would. A sound behind him drew his head around to anxiously eye the door. Voices in the hallway...

"I do trust you."

The simple, honest delivery of the statement had him turning back around to stare at her. She stared back, her gaze almost unnervingly open.

"I trust you," she repeated, her own eyes flickering to the door, hearing what he had a moment before. Someone was right outside. "Lupin, if I don't make it out of here..."

The sound of tapping set his hand convulsively tightening its grip on his wand. "I'll get you out. I told you I would," he said, standing up. "Go stand over there, it'll give you better cover," he pointed to the table where Lennox had sat earlier.

Tiny fingers caught hold of his own far larger ones before he could step away. "No, listen. I'm...I'm sorry. For all of this."

"Claremont?" Lennox's call sounded resigned, as if expecting a brush-off.

Lupin's eyes were fixed on the door as he replied softly to Tonks, "Not your fault. We'll talk about this later."

"There might not be a later! Please, this is the only chance I'll have to tell you–"

He turned then, almost glaring but his gaze softening as he took in how distraught she was. As gently as he could manage with every nerve in his body strung tight as a drum, he squeezed her hand and persisted, "There will be another chance, I swear. You said you trust me. Then trust me in this as well. Please."

Another knock, harder this time. "Claremont, this is enough. Let me back in now." Lennox's voice was harsh, annoyance crackling in every syllable even through the thickness of oak.

"Come over here now," Lupin urged, tugging on her hand. She stumbled off the mattress and over to the other wall; in his opinion, she had to make use of her grip on his hand far too much to steady herself. He really was going to end up carrying her.

She let go and immediately clutched at the chipped edge of the table. "All right. But," she retorted quietly, breathing heavily already, "if you're wrong, then I'm coming back to haunt you."

Amusement, weak, somewhat forced but undeniably there, briefly flashed across her face, and, despite everything, he found himself smiling back. "Then I'll have to make extra certain."

No more knocking, this time a hand jiggled the door handle. They both turned to stare.

"The table," Tonks whispered. "Lupin, move over."

Once again he didn't bother to look over at her. "Why?"

"He's going to blast through the door, we'll get caught in the shrapnel, now move!"

"No, I'll do it, save your strength." She made as if to protest but his wand had already flicked toward the table, Levitating it, turning it on its side to serve as a barrier. The moment it settled to the floor in the middle of the room he motioned her over. "That was a good thought," he murmured, crouching down on the balls of his feet beside her. The table barely cleared his head.

"Yeah, well, I don't really fancy picking foot-long splinters out of my chest, you know? Wonder why he's taking so long?" she asked, frowning. "He's got to know something's wrong by now."

"It is odd," Lupin admitted slowly, peering carefully around the edge of the tabletop. "Though I agree he knows now that we're in here waiting. He might be getting Banks, or taking position in the kitchen. We may need to take the offensive, catch them off guard that way. Those two don't seem particularly bright."

He frowned in thought. She was right—something was off.

"_Protego._" The table glowed softly for a moment from his Shield spell. He leaned back to find her regarding him curiously. "What?"

"You look like utter shite, you know. Absolutely covered in blood."

Her teasing tone took him completely by surprise. Was she always like this, flippant even in the face of death? "Yes, well, I think it's all yours," he shot back, torn between humour and annoyance. He gave her a quick once-over—torn dress, curls matted down and sticky with blood. Her eyes were blackening despite the healed nose, and her legs and arms were covered with all the evidence of Claremont's attentions. And her back...his stomach turned and he hastily looked back at her face. "And you haven't seen yourself yet."

"I think I can wait," she answered dryly, her blue eyes all too knowing. She hadn't missed that last furtive glance at the wounds on her back, apparently, and fear flickered in the recesses of her gaze before she looked back to the door. "Did you hear something?"

He froze, listening. "Where?"

"Down the hallway, maybe? Sounded like another door opening. It's hard to tell." She poked her head warily out from around her side of the barrier.

Some guardian impulse sent Lupin grabbing for her arm. "Get back!"

* * *

_**Evigilo**_** : to awaken/be alert**


	6. Every Tick of the Clock, Part 2

The door exploded without warning, sending jagged shards of burning wood flying over their heads to rain down on the carpet. Lupin curled protectively over Tonks, his breath rasping harshly in the thickening air, listening for any noise other than the soft hissing patter of debris falling around them. A cautious look over the edge of the table for any sign of the Death Eaters revealed nothing.

Ribbons of smoke were beginning to wind their way toward the ceiling from a few spots on the floor where the brands had begun to smolder. "Stay down," he whispered. He was just gathering himself to rise when the nagging feeling in the back of his head solidified into a full-blown shout of alarm. She'd heard a door opening...

He was moving before the thought had finished itself. Still in a crouch, he spun to the left on his heels and flung out the warning "The other bedroom!" just as a gaping wound was torn in the wall. Huge chunks of plaster, punctuated by smaller but no less deadly fragments of wooden board and wire mesh, hurtled in a widening arc toward where they cowered, unprotected.

"_Extundo!_" Lupin cried, even as this second explosion rocked the floor beneath them. The worst of the torrent was turned aside, or cast back upon itself, but the spell was a fraction too late, his aim thrown off by the tremors of the building itself, and the pieces that made it through were still capable of knocking him back into Tonks, catching him at hip and shoulder and temple.

They toppled backward, and though he tried to twist himself so as not to make her take the full brunt of his weight, he felt at least an arm or a leg under his side as he came down, and heard her cry out again. He landed with a bone-jarring thud, head catching one of the legs of the table hard enough to send flares of light cascading through his vision, and so he didn't see Lennox come tumbling in through the clouds of smoke and plaster dust, far more agile than his size would have suggested—not until the huge man already had a knee and one foot firmly braced against the floor and wand raised to strike. Even as he raised his own wand again, Lupin knew he wouldn't, couldn't be fast enough to stop whatever was coming.

"_Avada Kedavra!_"

"_Everbero!_"

Tonks' shrill cry cut through the deeper roar of Lennox. A split second later would have been far too late, but her offensive spell smacked into him before the killing curse was fully cast, and the green jet of light left a small crater in the far wall beyond Lupin to mark its passing. A few answering red flashes splashed a line of score marks across the abutting wall. Banks had finally decided to join the fight as well.

"Get up!" Tonks hissed into Lupin's ear, still partially trapped beneath him.

He rolled over and scrambled quickly to his knees, glad for the sudden burst of energy that fighting provided. He'd need every bit of it. Trapped like rats, besieged on two sides instead of one in this hellish little flat, the whole thing made more hellish now by the smoke and tiny flickers of flame scattered around the room. He didn't even want to think about what the odds were now on getting out of there.

"Deal with Banks!" he cried over his shoulder. There was no way to look and see how she was, or if she was even capable of doing such a thing; Lennox was already recovered, his face a blackening cloud of fury and violence, and Lupin was hard pressed to duck and roll fast enough under the rapid fire of several curses. Only the answering shots from his own wand kept Lennox off balance enough not to land a hit, and the man was sent retreating back behind the shelter of the broken bedroom wall. From such a defensible position, with Lupin a sitting duck out in the open, Lennox had the upper hand. There had to be some way to even the odds.

Lupin cast desperately around the room for something besides the table—which Tonks needed even more than he did, by the looks of things; she and Banks were trading curses and hexes back and forth from behind their respective hiding places of table and doorway—to help him, when his eyes lit on the mattress. Stained beyond repair, no longer suited for its original purpose of sleeping, still it could prove useful. With springs squealing from the treatment, Lupin sent his improvised battering ram crashing directly into the spot where Lennox had taken refuge, with enough force to take out another portion of wall and keep going, barreling over everything in its path, Lennox included. The mattress landed in a ruined heap in the middle of the other bedroom, coated in chips of plaster and paint and wood, while its victim lay groaning on the floor just short of it.

Lupin was on the floor as well. He'd nearly missed the flare of light against the movement of the mattress, where Lennox, faster than seemed possible, responded to the oncoming attack with a well-aimed shot of his own. It flew toward Lupin and struck true, though a wrenching of his body to one side meant that only his wand arm was hit. It did its share of damage, though, slicing deeply into his upper arm and making him drop his wand as he lost muscle control below the elbow. His left hand clapped over the wound with teeth gritted against the pain. His wand hadn't flown far, nor did it take long to grab it up and cast a quick healing spell on his arm, just enough to slow the bleeding and knit the muscles back together somewhat, but even that scant minute cost him. He looked up again, expecting to find Lennox still laid out and semi-conscious, but it seemed that Lupin had underestimated the other man's constitution, which was proving itself to be almost impossibly resilient. Even as Lupin brought his wand up again in attack, the huge Death Eater was already rising to his knees and able to throw up a shield in time for the spell to be deflected harmlessly off in another direction.

Lupin's ears picked up a faint tinkle of breaking glass, and a thump, and then he was skipping sideways to avoid another lightning fast onslaught from Lennox. It wasn't until he saw a purple burst of light go winging its way through the haze toward his opponent that he realized what the thump meant, and that the odds had improved in his favour. Tonks was somewhere behind him and off to his right, having dispatched her sparring partner and thrown herself immediately into the next fray. She was already putting up quite a fight all by herself.

Lennox made the mistake of hesitating between the two of them and ended up getting caught between another hard-hitting Everbero! from Tonks and a physical blow to the back of the head from the remains of the mattress, which Lupin put to good use once again. Their foe was knocked sideways, halfway covered by the weapon that had been his undoing, and the victors were left struggling to catch their breath.

Lupin didn't stop to find out whether or not Lennox was still moving. Didn't care, really, if the man even survived. He spun around, quickly took in the fact that Tonks was standing now, shaky but upright, and dousing the little tongues of flame licking at the carpet. She grinned at him even as she gulped down lungfuls of air, disturbingly cheerful and looking every inch the sort of imp that would fit into this scene of hell on earth: dirt-smeared and sooty, the whites of her eyes nearly blood red from the smoke and her own overtaxed body. One thumb jerked back over her shoulder to indicate the prone figure in the doorway.

"Banks is down. Stupid bastard, he pretty much took himself out on the table's Shield spell at one point, and I finished him off with the whiskey bottle. That'll teach him to drink on the jo–hey!" she protested as Lupin came up to her without warning and scooped her into his arms. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Too much time has been wasted," he replied shortly, "we can't stand around here talking." A bleeding Banks lay directly in his path and Lupin had no qualms about stepping squarely on the man's back to get through. "You need to be in hospital."

"Pffft," she waved one hand in dismissal. "I'm fine."

"Fine?" he demanded in a strangled voice, stepping far more carefully around the broken glass that lay strewn all over the floor. "You don't honestly believe that, do you?"

"Lupin," she laughed, and for the first time he noticed a frenzied undertone to her voice, "honestly, I get banged up at work all the time. Just take me back to Headquarters and Molly can patch me up."

He didn't bother to answer. A sudden dread fell over him, drying up any arguments he might have been willing to give her. He'd known, had expected that the extra kick of adrenaline from the fight would amplify the effects of the pain spells he'd so reluctantly cast on her; she was flying now, but a crash was inevitable, and he knew it would be a hard one. That it was coming already was patently clear—her own carefree nonchalance betrayed more about the state of her body than she knew—and cause for no little alarm, since in his experience, it should not have come so soon. He didn't want to jolt her by running, but he did considerably lengthen his stride, covering the distance between them and the front door as quickly as he could.

_BOOM._

The floor shook again, and they heard the shattering of a window.

"What was–" Tonks craned her neck to look over his shoulder.

"Lennox." Running was preferable to death. In one breath he went from walking to sprinting through the rest of the apartment, ignoring the burning pain in his legs as he careened around the corner into the short entranceway.

And jerked to a stop. The front door was glowing faintly in the shadows.

"Shit!" he swore, now firmly in the grip of panic. A seal like this took time to break. And more than likely they didn't even have a single minute, much less the five or so he hoped it would take. Could well be more.

"Can you handle getting this door open?" he demanded quickly, setting her as gently as he could on the floor.

One hand flew up to cover a giggle. "Of course I can."

God. She was already too far gone. There went that option. He ran back to the living room, eyes racing over the furniture as well as casting anxious glances down toward the room they'd so lately escaped from. There were muffled scrapings coming down the hallway, and one low groan.

"Here," he said, wand flicking toward the heavy sofa along one wall. He Levitated it to the entrance of the hallway, tipping it on one end. It didn't fit well, which suited his impromptu plan well enough. "Repello!" There was a satisfying crunch as the whole thing wedged itself into the too-small space, and in addition to another Shield spell he added one that would strengthen the whole structure—or so he hoped—in order to buy them a few more seconds. Or so he hoped.

"Try to keep that Shield spell up, okay?" he spoke slowly as he approached her and led her back to where the entranceway met the front room, not at all liking the way her eyes were beginning to wander. "The strongest one you have. Okay? Do you understand?"

She gave him a vague nod. "Ooo-kay."

No other choice. No other choice, damn it, he knew there wasn't, and so he turned back with frantic haste to the problem of the seal on the door.

"The wall," Tonks whispered. He looked back at her, to where she was slumped slightly over, head tilted to one side and eyes beginning to go glassy.

"What?"

"You're thinking too much. Just blast through the wall like they did. Bet they're going to anyway." Her smile would have been more appropriate on a drunk.

She had a point, though damned if he knew how she could come up with something like that in the state she was in. He sized up the walls quickly, trying to size up where best to land the blow, when the first attack came. Even from where he stood, Lupin heard the hollow bell tone of a spell bouncing off the shielded couch, and then another. Time was up. He turned to grab her up in his arms again.

And gasped. She was no longer behind him, no longer in the entranceway at all. He darted back to the living room. "Nymphadora!"

She stood not quite in the middle of the room, head turned to look at him with a peculiar, dreamy sort of expression. "See?" she pointed at the couch, still holding position as a barricade. "They could have got that down. They're going to go through–"

"We need to go," he cut through the sleepy explanation and went to pick her up, his own voice barely under control. She dodged away from him with swift movements that contrasted strangely with the sluggish quality of her laughter.

There was no time for this, something inside him roared. He reached for her again and she darted toward the window, the grin on her face holding nothing of humour and her eyes holding nothing of sanity.

Never in his memory had he been so overwhelmed by terror and desperation over another human life, not even that night at Hogwarts with Sirius and Peter and the children. Even if the Death Eaters packed up now and decided to call it a day, she was going to die anyway, simply because he couldn't get her out of this damnable flat. He was almost on the verge of Stunning her himself.

There was a double cry from the hallway, two voices raised in unison though calling out different words, and then several things happened at once, almost too fast for Lupin to take in.

The couch erupted in flames, and almost immediately burst from it place like a cannon shot.

Jets of red and green followed, along with their casters, flying into the room at such speed that Lupin could only throw himself at Tonks in a futile attempt to take her out of the line of fire.

And Tonks herself danced out of the way, humming tunelessly. The furious shots that Lennox and Banks hurled at her never quite seemed to hit, and she dodged them as if they were all playing a game in a park and the shafts of light that flew around her nothing more than children's toys. With a sly grin on her face, she threw out her arm, wand extended, and stopped the blazing couch before it had traveled the length of the room, sang out a command and with an almost careless sweeping motion sent it plunging back toward their captors.

It caught Banks squarely across the chest, Lennox more obliquely on a hip, and with a splintering crash of wood and plaster and sparks it drove both men into the wall. Banks' terrified screams rang out above the crackling of the fire, which quickly spread its greedy fingers outward.

Lupin drew himself up shakily on hands and knees and turned to stare at her, aghast. She stood there laughing. The couch was a torch, the men trapped behind it, and she was _laughing_...

"No," he breathed, his mind was overburdened with the madness of the past several hours. It was all because of these men, these Death Eaters who would happily kill the two of them and feel no remorse whatsoever. But he couldn't walk away and let them burn. Something inside him rebelled at the very idea.

With a word he extinguished the flames, and prayed that he wouldn't regret that action later.

A groan forced its way past his lips as he stood up. Tonks stood still, finally, still giggling quietly to herself while he limped up to her, nor did she voice the smallest complaint when he once again picked her up and began carrying her toward the front door.

He sent up another silent prayer that there were no Muggles outside in the corridor—all of the explosions had to have been reported to the authorities by now—but there was no help for it.

"_Reducto!_" Dust was still swirling to the ground when Remus, cradling Tonks against him, stepped through and stumbled down toward the stairwell. The corridor was eerily silent. She began to hum once more against his chest, long, wheezing notes with no direction or melody, and he picked up his walking pace a little. The end of the notes began to rattle in her lungs, and he forced his legs to run.

"Hold on, hold on, please hold on," he muttered to her, "we're almost there, just a little further." The quiet flow of words continued as he reached the stairs, his feet and mouth at odds as the one contradicted the message of the other.

Halfway down, he was caught utterly unprepared for her scream; only battle-tightened reflexes kept his grip tight around her and made sure they didn't both go crashing down the stairs.

Her eyes were open, cloudy, but quite clearly seeing, and he followed the line of her gaze and one trembling finger up to the third floor landing, although somehow, even before his eyes found the figure standing there, he knew who it would be. The unreasoning terror in her eyes spoke the name clearly.

Claremont's face was no longer human, his features twisted by such animalistic fury that nothing of their natural beauty remained. He had already taken aim at his quarry, using a wand obviously looted from the body of one of his companions, and so by the time Lupin was looking up, the red jet of light was already streaking toward him. Without thinking he jumped and immediately heard the faint ching of the spell ricocheting off the wall, directly behind the space his head had just occupied. Knees and ankles shrieked at taking the jolt of landing four stairs below, but he forced himself to stumble forward, to keep going.

Already he could hear Claremont's rapid footsteps behind them, could hear the curses the man threw, heard himself throw a few back. Most of that was a blur, though. One thought and one thought alone dominated his thoughts, and he put every bit of energy he possessed into complying with that thought.

Run.

One more flight. Twenty more stairs. He could see the front door.

Run.

Ten stairs.

Run.

Tonks was shaking as though her body wanted to fly apart, and she continued to cry out whenever she heard Claremont's voice echoing through the stairwell chamber, fingers clawing at the front of Lupin's shirt like she wanted to crawl in and hide.

Run.

They reached the bottom floor and Remus was nearly to the entrance when they heard a maddened snarl behind them. Claremont had gained the second floor landing, and the curse that Lupin slammed himself into the wall to avoid instead pulverized the glass window to one side of the door, showering everything around it in tiny, stinging shards.

The footsteps resumed. Another curse, another narrow leap put of harm's way with Lupin beginning to despair over how long he could keep this up, and then without warning Tonks was twisting, bringing her wand up, crying out in obvious pain but clearly too far gone to care much; her tortured gaze was nearly as crazed as that of the man who pursued them. It was all Lupin could do to hold on to her while she shrieked her fury back at her tormentor.

The curse hit two steps below Claremont with an impact that crumbled the whole flight of stairs and part of the landing above it as well. In an earsplitting screech of twisting metal, the entire structure collapsed. Claremont disappeared into the gaping hole that had appeared below him, though his own cries were drowned out in the greater echoing thunder of the avalanche closing over him.

Lupin stared, frozen in shock as everything settled, the last few bits of rubble falling to the top of the larger heap and slithering quietly down. There was no sign that any life remained under the debris.

Tonks's growing distress jerked his attention back. She was frantically drawing in air, choking rasps that spoke of too much pain and too little air reaching where it was supposed to. Apparating out of here wasn't going to help either of those things, and he knew, though perhaps a danger in and of itself, that the most merciful thing he could at that moment was to put her out again. Wand tip at her forehead, he murmured a quiet "_Somnus_" and anxiously watched her head fall back, oblivious if not peaceful and with her breathing somewhat eased, which was as much as could be hoped for right now. It felt like every cell in his body was begging for just a little more time as he pushed through the door. He glanced, wild-eyed, around the neighborhood, clasped her as tightly against him as he dared, and Disapparated.

* * *

**A/N: Everyone still breathing? All right, that's the last of the cliffies for awhile, I promise, and thank you for not doing me any bodily violence as I merrily jerked your emotions around.  
**

**Thaaaank yooouuuu to everyone who has reviewed so far. I lost track of which reviews I responded to for chapter four and which I didn't. So, if I didn't, I apologize, and I'll try not to let my brain hare off this time.**

_**Everbero**_**: to strike violently  
**_**Extundo**_**: drive away, repel violently  
**_**Repello**_**: to drive back, repel  
**_**Somnus**_**: sleep**


	7. Green the Grass

Dapples of sunlight pierced the canopy overhead to lay strewn across the undergrowth like stars stranded on the wrong side of the sky. A restless breeze whispered its song through the trees, which in turn nodded their ancient heads in time to the music until the motes of light at their feet were set to dancing. Farther off in the wood there rang out the sweetness of bird song.

High summer in this forest glen was a time of peace, calmed from the flurried activity of spring, not yet caught up in the gathering frenzies of autumn. It lent itself to introspection, given the changeable yet never-changing nature of the living things that composed it. That, and the strange autonomy it had managed to lay claim to, free from the deprivations of the human race that had destroyed so many of its sister forests. There was none of the sort of trouble associated only with humans. No one ever came here, with one curious exception.

An exception who now stood gulping in lungfuls of clean air, swaying on his feet in the sunshine much as the trees swayed above him.

Lupin had struggled during those few frantic seconds of hesitation outside the block of flats, trying to bend his flagging energies to the question of where to Apparate. In the end, though, instinct had played just as crucial a role as logic, sending him off to the one place he knew no one else could follow, a place that for most of his life had spelled out safety.

The faint _crack_ of his appearance had done little to disturb the tranquility of the woods, sending only the nearest birds winging away. He looked around. It felt like a breach of confidence, coming here bearing such evidence of the terrors of the outside world.

He looked down at her, limp in his arms. What choice did he have? It had come to him with a bitter shock of understanding that the one place she most needed to be was in fact the one place he of all people could not take her. A publicly known, openly distraught werewolf walking into St. Mungo's, the bearer of an obvious victim of violence? Any sane Healer would summon the Aurors first and ask questions later. And given that Lupin was the sole available source of information as to what had happened to her, possibly the only one who could do anything to help her quickly enough, while every second her life was ebbing away…

He was no such fool, no matter how badly she was hurt.

Lupin could not take her, and while this was something he accepted with almost habitual resignation, still, deep inside him anger simmered, and humiliation. Had he been a normal man, she would already be at the hospital where she belonged. Had he been a normal man, she might never have been hurt in the first place.

It bore in on him that he was wasting time. That his legs were shaking, that he was sinking down into the soft ground cover because while his mind ran in fruitless circles, his body had acknowledged that its last bit of strength had been spent in getting them to this spot. His knees slammed into the glen floor, every joint crying out, but somehow his arms stayed locked around his small burden as through sheer force of will he kept himself upright.

His thoughts chased themselves around his head in a mad parade. Help. He needed help. In order to get help he had to actually put her down. He couldn't put her down, couldn't move, she was dying in his arms and he couldn't do a goddamned thing to help her, even now when he'd gotten her away, he needed _help_…

Pain lanced from one temple to the other, shocking him out of the sickening downward spiral of despair. Deeply buried resilience born of more than three decades of monthly torture exerted itself, and he gritted his teeth and bent.

He laid her on her stomach in the soft grass, her arms and legs in an ungainly sprawl. From a distance she might have looked like any ordinary child who, after tiring herself out from too much play, had simply thrown herself down where she stood and fallen asleep. Lupin's vantage point allowed for no such happy illusion. Her back was something out of a nightmare. He desperately wanted to believe that her unconscious state brought her some small measure of peace, but even that hope was crushed by the look on her face, the small, delicate features drawn so tightly together that he knew pain pursued her even in the darkness.

His body put up a vicious protest as he shifted to sit beside her. The sweet, wild smell of crushed grass and flowers rose up as he mentally flicked through the pathetically brief list of people he could call on for help, coming up with Moody at the top. Moody, who would flay him alive when he saw what had been done to her, but would at least recognize the need for haste and skip unnecessary questions.

Lupin's first two attempts at casting his Patronus produced absolutely nothing. Oddly, this unnerved him nearly as much as everything else that had happened already. It hadn't happened in years. He closed his eyes, blocking out the sight of the girl in front of him, and called up an old, old memory. The tight, sick feeling in his gut eased a fraction, momentarily soothed by images of a bright smile and brighter eyes, eyes that could still spark pain-edged pleasure even at a moment like this. They rewarded him with a surge of power up his arm and the luminescent figure of his Patronus staring back at him when he opened his eyes again.

It took seconds to convey the message to the grinning fox, and even before it had disappeared on its errand Lupin was setting to work easing the fabric of Tonks' dress away from the markings on her back. They pulsed a dull, sickly green, in hideous contrast to the richer hues of nature around them, suggesting decay rather than growth. Her clothing was stained with the same colour, and soon his hands as well. He'd rather have been marked by blood rather than this evil residue, and blood there was, leaking from other minor wounds, but none came from the intricate, deadly runes that crawled over her skin.

A _pop_ sounded behind him.

"Alastor," Lupin murmured, not bothering to turn. The air in the glade went still, the forest having scented and identified an outsider. Again he cursed the necessity of bringing others here.

"Remus? Merlin's balls, man, what happened?" Moody's voice, rough as ever, grated across the clearing as he stumped forward. "Why-"

The word cut off abruptly, replaced by a string of profanities. He'd seen her.

The soft thud of wooden leg on grass quickened, and the older man came into Lupin's line of vision, though he kept to his task and didn't look up.

"Tell me."

The two words were a blade sliding out of its sheath, quiet, filled with menace. Lupin winced. He'd known that the man was fond of the girl, protective even.

"We were set up, Alastor. Claremont knew who she was, he came for her specifically. He even knew that I—well, that someone in the Order—would be there. They ambushed us separately and took us to a flat nearby. He…wasn't gentle." He paused, leaning down to prise away a few dirty linen fibres that had gotten caught in one of the wounds, his fingers coming away feeling vaguely of pins and needles. When he looked up, it was to meet the furious gaze of the retired Auror. "_Viscus Perussi_. Ever heard of it?"

So far as Lupin knew of Moody, his magical eye wouldn't have stopped searching the perimeter of the glen from the moment he arrived, but now both eyes snapped forward, though a second later the electric blue orb moved to focus intently on her wounds. "Aye, but I've never come across it myself, only read about it. Filthy thing." He limped closer and squatted awkwardly down beside her body, opposite Lupin. "Is that what th' bastard did to her? What all this is?" One gnarled hand swept a gesture over the glowing ciphers.

Lupin nodded and gently prised away one last thread from where it stuck to her back.

"You know the counterspell?"

This time his nod was more cautious, and though he didn't look up, Lupin could feel Moody's gaze boring into his scalp.

"What else do I need to know?"

It only took a minute for Lupin to outline the damage done to the building in the course of the fighting and the possible casualties, his voice flat, as though somehow brevity and lack of emotion could distance him from what had happened.

Moody's expression was stony. "How long's the spell going to take?"

"I don't know," Lupin admitted. "Twenty minutes, maybe. Maybe more. Certainly not less. It's hard to gauge. I don't even know if it will work." He went to rub one green-slimed hand across his eyes and stopped himself just in time.

"You can do it alone?"

"Do I have a choice?"

Moody gave a nod of concession, heaved himself upright and shook out his cloak. "Do what you have to. I'll be back when I can."

"Wait, where are you going?" Lupin demanded. "She won't have much time once I'm done. After the spell is lifted she'll lose even more blood, you have to be ready, you need to be here to-"

"I'll be here. Think, Remus. Blankets, and some blood potion, she'll need those too. And someone's got to get over t'those flats before either the Muggle authorities or Ministry agents do, if it's not too late already. I'm no use to you right now, so let me go and do what I can, while there's still time."

Moody's gruff assessment of the situation stirred up both relief that more capable hands were taking command, and chagrin that he'd snapped at the man. "No more than twenty minutes," Lupin cautioned anxiously.

Another nod and the old Auror was gone. The glen seemed dismally empty in the wake of his leaving.

Lupin turned back to the girl, breathing deeply to steady his nerves. He was far more scared of what he was about to attempt than he'd been willing to let on. Once begun, the counterspell, like the spell itself, couldn't be halted without incalculable damage to the person on whom it was being cast. Not that Claremont would have cared an iota about that, Lupin thought, mouth twisting in anger. From his own side of the equation, however, there was no room for error.

He wished now that he'd paid closer attention to how Claremont had laid out the deadly twining pattern on her skin. The initial component of the spell was simple, deceptively so: a nonverbal spell that allowed raw magic to flow from the tip of the caster's wand as ink flows from a quill nib. The difficulty lay in retracing the lines that Claremont had already laid down. If Lupin deviated at all from those lines, whatever was missed would continue to burrow inward, consuming everything in its path.

He took a last deep breath, and began.

Ten minutes passed, and he'd only just reached her shoulder blades. The world shrank to contain nothing but the unnatural glow of the symbols he traced. A butterfly flitted nearby, coming to rest first on her hair, then on one thin shoulder, but Lupin never noticed. Fifteen minutes and his wand was flowing over the middle of her back. The sun shone overhead, marking noon. A bead of sweat trickled down his face.

At a bare inch left to go, nearly twenty-five minutes after he'd begun, another _pop_ announced Moody's return. The ground trembled slightly under the weight of his steps, but Lupin remained so engrossed in his task that he never felt it. The old man stayed silent until, with a bone-deep sigh, Lupin straightened.

"Remus?"

"Almost done," Lupin answered the Auror's unspoken question. He raised his wand, steadying his shaking arm with his other hand. "_Lac lactis caelestum._"

Just as with the initial spell, nothing happened for several uncomfortably long moments. Both men waited, holding apprehensive breaths, hoping Lupin had done his job well enough. Green flared suddenly to white and began to bleed over the edges of her wounds in milky rivulets, soaking into the fabric of her ruined dress, dripping down into the grass beneath her. The white slowly turned to pink and then to red, reassuring both men that all of the transmuted poison had been flushed away in the upwelling of fresh blood.

"Gods," Moody muttered, and hurriedly stepped forward. "Here, wrap her in this."

Lupin took the thick blanket Moody held out and bundled her limp body up as best he could, willing himself not to panic at just how much blood there was, at how deeply the spell had eaten into her skin. He staggered as he rose with her once more in his arms. She felt so small, even wrapped in layers of heavy wool, far too fragile to survive something like this. Her skin was frighteningly pale, her features pinched, her lips tinged blue. Mercifully she was still breathing.

"Wait, she'll need this first." Moody used his teeth to uncork a small vial of thin blue liquid. With more care than Lupin would have thought him capable of, he pried her jaw open and tipped the contents in, rubbing her throat to make sure she swallowed the potion down. "Right," Moody said after he spat the cork onto the grass and gently accepted the girl, "I'll get her to St. Mungo's. You get yourself back to headquarters and fixed up before you land in th' hospital yourself. And wash that shite off your hands, no telling what it'll do to you."

"I will."

Remus continued to stand there long after man and girl disappeared. He felt empty, used up, pushed beyond exhaustion into numbness. He knew he ought to follow Moody's orders, go back and patch himself up, but he couldn't summon the will to Apparate. In his mind all he could see was the image of her face as Claremont's spell took effect. The terror in her eyes. The pain.

Without warning his stomach emptied itself, forcing him to his hands and knees to retch helplessly onto the grass. It was only afterward, as he stood and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his body trembling with aftershock, that he noticed a bright spot of colour on the ground.

There at his feet, its legs stained an unnatural shade of green, lay a butterfly, dead.

* * *

**A/N: __****Lac lactis caelestum****: literally, milk of the gods.**

******That wasn't a cliffie, right? Er... *points* Hey, look, a dinosaur!**

**It's more than a little overwhelming that people have stuck around despite a years-long absence of updates. Thank you. The fandom is truly inspiring at times. And a special thank-you to Lady Ruthless, without whom you all might have waited years more for the rest of the story. L.R., you win the prize for the non-violent prodding of a delinquent writer. This is a coupon for one free Contact-centric drabble of your choosing (have mercy, though, please, and pick something other than fluff, my tolerance for reading and writing fluff having dried up years ago—anything else goes). PM me with what y'ants.  
**


	8. Avoidance Issues

Lupin woke gasping. He could feel ropes binding his legs, his arms. The room was filled with the stench of sweat-soaked fear. He knew struggle was useless but did it anyway, fought with all the strength of unreasoning panic. Sunlight stabbed at his eyes when he opened them, blinding him.

It was the light that confused him more than anything. That, and the unexpected smells that registered despite his panic. The Death Eaters' dungeon of a flat had been shade-darkened, and smelt of tobacco and whiskey, not this bitter-savory blend of coffee and bacon and the underlying rot of mould and musty carpeting. It was enough to make him pause and truly consider his surroundings.

His room.

His own room in Sirius' house.

He collapsed back onto the pillow, blinking away the last remnants of sleep, not bothering to disentangle himself from the cocoon of blankets that had wound themselves so implacably around him. Every inch of him ached, but he found he could almost welcome the dull burn of overtaxed muscles. Better to focus on that than on the previous day's memories which hovered, dark and sinister, on the edges of thought.

Molly had cleaned and healed his cuts and bruises and dosed him with the strongest pain potion in the house before allowing him to stumble up the two flights of stairs to his bedroom. If she'd asked him about the mission, he didn't remember now. He didn't remember pulling off his reeking clothes, or crawling under the blankets. Idly he wondered what time it was. Late morning, to judge by the obscene amount of sunlight blazing in the window. He'd slept almost an entire day.

A light tap on his door saved him from having to turn over and look at the clock on the wall.

"Come in," he called, or tried to. His voice seemed to be in the same shape as the rest of him. His second attempt, slightly more successful, saw the door handle turn and Molly's head peer in.

"Remus? May I come in?" Seeing his nod, she pushed the door fully open and stepped in, bringing with her a glass of water and a vial of potion. "I thought you might need this when you finally woke up." She set the things down on the small bedside table and stood over him, frowning slightly. "Kingsley was by earlier wanting to see you. I told him you were still asleep. He seemed so worried. I wish you'd let me call Poppy yesterday, Remus. I've never seen you looking so, er…" She trailed off, evidently trying to find a tactful way to describe his appearance when he'd shown up on the doorstep of 12 Grimmauld, barely on his feet and seconds away from collapse. He hadn't bothered to tell her that it would have been the second time in less than an hour.

"I believe the phrase you're searching for is 'death warmed over.'" Lupin wormed a hand out from the blankets and rubbed his face. He wasn't sure that death didn't feel better than this. "Don't fret yourself over it, Molly, I needed sleep more than anything else."

Her expression as she looked him up and down spoke volumes. "You might want to take a long look in the mirror before you try to convince me of that, or anyone else for that matter, Remus. I'm just glad that none of the children saw you come in. You'd have scared them to death."

Lupin saw the change on her face, her own unspoken questions loud in the silence, and decided that being pressed for answers was something he'd give almost anything to avoid just then. "I'm feeling much better. Whatever you gave me last night made me sleep like the dead. It's just soreness now."

She still looked unconvinced. "Well, if you're not on your feet by this evening, I'm giving Poppy a Floo call."

"No, no, Molly, I'm fine, really. Look, I'll get up now," he protested, quickly sitting up and just as quickly regretting it. Only by keeping his jaw firmly clenched could he keep from escaping exactly the sorts of noises that would send Molly scurrying for Floo powder. Idiot, he thought, just stay in bed and let pride be damned; but he'd already gotten his legs free and his mouth tasted like bile. He reached quickly for the glass of water and downed it along with the pain potion.

The drink helped a little. A shower and food would help more, and he said so, waiting, outwardly patient, until Molly conceded defeat and went away, leaving him with one last anxious glance and the promise of a hot breakfast. He sighed. A shower would feel good. And a shave. His chin itched. All of him itched, really. Hopefully Sirius hadn't ransacked the bathroom on this floor again and taken the soap, Lupin thought as he rummaged around for a reasonably clean robe. Breakfast. Definitely had to get something in his stomach before Kingsley put him through the third degree. Maybe he could even get a nap in before having to sit through that. With any luck the Auror wouldn't show up until the next day.

It wasn't until Lupin was in the shower, the water nearly hot enough to scald but still not hot enough to wash away the residual crawling of his skin, that reaction overtook him. He leaned hard against the tile wall and shook, and shook, and laughed bitterly in the midst of his shaking. Had he really thought that he could just carry on and pretend that nothing had happened? That there wasn't a girl lying in hospital in who knew what sort of shape right at that moment, while he did his best to avoid all thought or discussion of her and instead contemplated eggs and bacon and catching up on lost sleep? What sort of coward did that? And what was he so afraid of, anyway?

Not a single question that Kingsley could ask would be any worse than the ones that descended now like so many circling crows. Lupin slumped forward until the shower spray fell in a curtain around his face. He could see nothing outside the cascade of water. He wondered how long he could stay there before anyone came to find him.

* * *

The bedroom door that he'd so carefully and quietly shut stood open. Lupin stopped and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, resisting the tempation to continue on past the door and escape down the stairs. If it was Kingsley, he told himself, better to just get it over with, lance the wounds before they festered. Besides, he wouldn't get far in nothing but a damp robe. He stepped in with a sigh.

It wasn't Kingsley who sat waiting.

"Enjoy your shower?"

"Would that be before or after you charmed the water cold enough to make me choke on my own testicles? I thought practical jokes like that were confined to schools."

Sirius settled further into the chair he'd claimed, his feet propped up on a corner of the small desk tucked into one corner of the bedroom. He'd snagged a piece of toast from the tray that lay across the foot of the bed and now took another bite, grinning around the mouthful.

"You could have just knocked."

Sirius shook his head. "Wouldn'tve worked," he mumbled, still chewing. "You want to talk about it?"

"Not really."

"Are you all right?"

"I'll live."

"Wasn't what I meant, Moony."

"Then leave off the ambiguous questions," Lupin snapped. He stalked over to the bed and sat down. After a moment's consideration he muttered an apology. Sirius was goading him, yes, but Lupin thought he knew why. "I wasn't going to off myself in your bathroom, if that's what you were worried about." He looked up, only to find Sirius staring out the window. All traces of the man's smile were gone.

"Moody was here earlier, you know. He told me what happened. Well, some of what happened." He turned back to regard Lupin with somber eyes. "From what he said, you're lucky to be alive. I think I've the right to make sure you're not going to off yourself in my bathroom."

Lupin swallowed painfully. "I've lived through worse. How much did he tell you?"

"Not as much as he knew, that's for damned sure. Cagey bastard. Given the circumstances, I'd guess you didn't have enough time to tell him everything that had happened, and you were in no shape yesterday to handle an interrogation. That leaves me stumbling around in the dark, which, I hardly need tell you, isn't a place I'm overly fond of. So if you're going to fly off the handle over questions regarding your well-being, you might do me the favour of at least telling me what the hell happened to my cousin. No one will bloody tell me how she is, other than that she's still alive." Sirius' voice shook with ill-suppressed anger. "Comforting, yeah? Still alive." His fist came down on the edge of the desk; crumbs from the piece of toast still clenched in his hand raining down, unheeded, to the floor. "Gods, I hate being stuck in this place."

Lupin opened his mouth and shut it again, unsure of what to say. He'd avoided asking what her condition was, assuming that they'd have told him if the worst had happened. Now, knowing definitively that she still lived, he was taken aback by his own dispassionate response to the news. It made him uneasy.

His face must have betrayed something of what he felt. Sirius' eyes narrowed. "So when were you planning on asking how she was? I admit I was surprised, when Molly told me you were awake, that you hadn't immediately stormed the kitchen demanding answers."

Lupin had the sudden and uncomfortable sense of being trapped in a corner, and surreptitiously backed a step toward the door. He'd forgotten what it was like to be on the receiving end of Sirius' suspicion. He shrugged and looked away. "I wasn't up to storming anywhere. I...needed time to put myself together. Someone would have told me if she hadn't made it through. Molly would have, surely. When she didn't, well, I just assumed things were- That Nym- That she was doing all right. I didn't really want to talk about it so soon. It's, it's still too soon, Sirius." None of the stumbling, awkward explanation came out as he wanted it to, and the silence radiating from the opposite end of the room made him look back.

Sirius sat staring at him, his face wiped ominously blank of expression. Abruptly he jerked his feet off the desk, stood, and walked out. Lupin was left staring in his own turn, conscience-stricken and wishing, not for the last time, that he'd just stayed in bed.

* * *

The corridors of St. Mungo's bustled with staff and patients, but the old man with the false eye and the wooden leg refused to move a single inch from the position he'd taken up outside the door to Nymphadora Tonks' room. A passing Healer shot him a dirty look, which he ignored much as he'd ignored all the others. Neither Death nor the Devil was going to stir him a step, though his expression suggested that he might have welcomed the challenge.

Inside her room Nymphadora lay insensible to the world around her. The Healers had placed her on her stomach, her back heavily bandaged. She'd been pale as death under the blood and the bruises when Moody had arrived with her limp in his arms, and nothing had changed since then despite multiple doses of blood replenishing potion. She was out of danger, they insisted, but her wasted appearance mocked their reassurances, and so her self-appointed guardian remained in place outside her door.

Another day passed. Nymphadora slept on.

* * *

**A/N: I love Moody. Just wanted to get that out there.**

**Thank you's go out to Nymphadora Andromeda Lupin, ExtendableEars, Sapphire BookNerd, Dori1587, TonksandlupinFANX, LadyRuthless, Don'tCallMeNymphadora4, Ainexx, Pyric, justwaitingontheworldtochange, AmeliaQ, ladylovercsi08, come-along-ponds, Famous4it, aineee, and the handful of anonymous reviewers who left comments for chapters 6 and 7—you guys rock. :3**


	9. Discussions and Dreams

The confrontation with Sirius—although Lupin felt "confrontation" to be a misnomer, since their conversation had been rendered uncomfortable not so much for its confrontational qualities as the lack of them—effectively ruined any chance for getting either more rest or something productive done that day. He picked at the food Molly had brought up, or paced the narrow strip of floor between the bed and the wall, or sat in his desk chair with his head in his hands when both appetite and restless energy deserted him.

Sounds filtered up through the floor from what Lupin guessed to be another pitched battle between the new and old residents of the house. He'd never understand how Molly, who fought tooth and nail to shelter her children from any and all evils of the outside world, could blithely threw those selfsame children into cleaning out rooms of a house which could, and had, made grown Wizards blanch. Lupin tensed as muted screams echoed shrilly from two stories down, forced himself to relax again as they abruptly became shrieks of laughter. He was grateful that Molly hadn't tried to conscript him this time. His present state of mind practically ensured that disaster would ensue one way or another.

The day seemed to stretch on forever.

* * *

Tonks dreamt of fire.

Sometimes it was a thing far off, and she would watch it draw closer, knowing she should run, knowing it would do her little good. Those dreams were frightening, but buried deep in her mind was the knowledge that they were in fact only dreams, and by their very definition she could only be trapped in them for so long.

Then there were the dreams where she was the fire, a living, breathing tongue of flame that devoured everything it touched. All, all became ashes and death, she herself was dying, for the fire spared nothing from its terrible burning presence, not even her own body, incorporeal though it appeared to be. These dreams pushed her beyond fear into despair, because they left nothing in her mind but the realisation that no matter how she fought, she could not escape herself, could not become other than herself.

This went on for a seeming eternity, but eventually one small change inserted itself into her dreams. As she stood, once again watching the fire's approach and willing herself to run, over the roaring flames she heard laughter. Whose laughter it was she didn't know, only knew that it was to be feared even more than the fire. She screamed.

And woke, screaming. For a single moment she thought she had escaped the fire, but then she felt the lick of flames over her back and instinctively threw herself forward, felt herself falling, hitting the ground with a bone-jarring thump. The floor was cold, and her fingers scrabbled over what felt like stone, but her mind could not separate itself from the hideous echo of laughter, nor the burning of her skin. She heard voices calling a name, her name, but from a distance, and she couldn't believe that they meant her no harm. She fled on hands and knees, blind to her surroundings, until she crashed into something solid. From behind her there came a shouted spell. She opened her mouth to scream again, but the spell stole her voice and stiffened her limbs where she huddled on the floor. It was only when she heard a second spell cast and felt darkness sweep over her that she understood and began to fight with all her remaining strength to stay awake. She wept silently as the voices faded and the dreams returned.

* * *

Molly brought word after supper that Kingsley had arrived. She didn't offer news about Tonks, and Lupin didn't ask. Instead he waited until the giggling and thumping and general noise that comes of children getting ready for bed had compeltely fallen off before heading down to the kitchen. He caught the murmur of voices as he made his careful way down the narrow hallway to the back stairs, murmurs which coalesced into intelligible speech as he slowly descended.

"-trying to figure out who the leak is."

"Wouldn't it have to be someone in the Ministry? If what Moody said was true, that the Death Eaters knew that Tonks would be there but not which member of the Order..."

"Probably. I don't know what the hell I'm going to tell Scrimgeour tomorrow, he's out for blood-"

The conversation cut off abruptly as Lupin pushed open the door. Kingsley sat across the table from Sirius, a thick stack of parchment and a half-empty bottle of Firewhisky between them. Both of them were nursing their glasses with the air of men who meant to do their duty and drink the bottle dry whether it needed it or not.

"Lupin." Kingsley tipped his head in greeting, his smile brief and his eyes tired.

Sirius didn't bother to look up at all.

With a small sigh and the knowledge that the next few hours were going to be excrutiating, Lupin summoned himself a glass and took a seat, stationing himself at the end of the table where he wouldn't have to look directly at either man.

"The kids asleep?" Kingsley asked.

Lupin nodded, pouring out a generous finger of whiskey. "I wouldn't be down here if they weren't." He knocked back his drink and poured himself another.

"Moody needs your report as soon as you can write it up."

"Already started." Lupin grimaced as the second shot went down. "I should have it done by noon tomorrow. Where's Alastor?"

"St. Mungo's, guarding Tonks' room. He wants a watch kept around the clock until she's out of there. I went to see him before I came here, told him to get some rest, let someone else guard her , but he wants to stay at least until she wakes up."

So she hadn't woken yet. Lupin wasn't sure whether this made him feel better or worse. "Is she in any danger?"

"She's in a secure ward," Kingsley shrugged. "No visitors unless they're approved by Scrimgeour first. Anyone determined to get to her would have to storm the doors. Then there's Moody, plus three other Aurors on guard shifts around the clock, though I think that's just Scrimgeour's insurance that the press doesn't get its claws into her. If Voldemort wants her badly enough to go through all that, she's not safe anywhere."

Lupin blinked, taken aback by the implications of so much security surrounding her. He shook his head. "No, sorry, I just meant- She's healing, right? There's no danger of...?" He couldn't quite bring himself to finish.

"Ah. No, she's going to be all right. It was a near thing, though, from what I understand."

"She'd lost a lot of blood," Lupin said in a hollow voice.

"No, that wasn't the problem. Not that it helped. I won't pretend to understand everything Moody told me—even her Healers don't fully understand what's going on. There's not a whole lot of information on metamorphs, and even less on how to treat them when they're injured, and none of it applied to what they had to deal with yesterday. She'd been holding the form of a child, right? Well, it takes energy to shift into a form so radically different to her own, and then hold that form for any significant amount of time. If it were a normal day, that wouldn't do more than tire her out a little, but between fighting and whatever it was that spell did to her...it was too much. Way too much. She'd tapped into her reserves to keep going, but she drained herself dry and her body was shutting down. That's why she's still out. The Healers are keeping her asleep until they're sure that shifting back into her normal form won't inadvertently kill her."

The memory of Tonks in the Death Eaters' flat, asking him—no, ordering him—to cast the spells that would keep her going until they both got out, splashed itself across Lupin's mind and set his hands shaking. He put his glass down carefully. He'd almost killed her. He'd known it at the time, and he'd done it anyway.

"Moony."

Lupin looked up to find Sirius looking back at him, exasperation and pity in his eyes.

"You got her out of there. Here." Sirius reached across and slopped more whiskey into Lupin's glass. "Drink. She's alive. I know that look. Stop trying to convince yourself that you did anything other than what had to be done."

Lupin stared. "You're not- I mean, you said-"

"I still think you're being an idiot, but let's not compound the issue with unnecessary guilt. You did what you had to do. She got to St. Mungo's alive. You made it here alive. It could have turned out a hell of a lot worse."

"Fair enough," Lupin muttered.

Kingsley was eyeing the other two men thoughtfully, but tactfully changed the subject. "So are you going to tell us what happened? I've got to give Scrimgeour something tomorrow."

Lupin straightened up with a heavy sigh. Downing that much Firewhiskey on an empty stomach hadn't done him any favors. "Let me get something to eat, then I'll tell you whatever you want to know."

Sirius and Kingsley grilled Lupin for another hour after he related to them everything he could remember of the day before. By the time they'd wrung every detail out of him, some of which he was surprised that he remembered at all, he was ready to drop. His lungs felt tight, congested, and his head throbbed, though he thought that might have been more to do with the whiskey.

Kingsley was tipped back in his chair, eyes fixed on the ceiling. "Sirius, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that it's going to be almost impossible to trace that leak. It could have been any number of people, and we just don't have the resources to-"

"Can we argue over this some other time?" Lupin interrupted, cradling his head in his crossed arms on the table. "Not that it isn't a fascinating subject, but you still haven't told me what you found at the flat. You got there before the Ministry?"

"I did. I can't guarantee that I got everything, but then there wasn't much to get. Lennox had gone by the time I arrived, and he'd pretty well torched everything left. He'd even dug Claremont out of the mess you two made of the stairwell. You're sure he was still under there when it fell?"

"No, I'm not sure. He had a sodding ton of cement fall in on him. If it didn't kill him outright, it at least did a decent bit of damage, but seeing as how I didn't have time to go poking around afterward, we can't really be sure of anything." Lupin lifted his head wearily. "I'm beginning to believe the rumours about Lennox."

"Which ones?" Sirius asked, the words slurring together slightly. He'd been the one to finish off the bottle, and it was beginning to show.

"Giant blood. Not like Hagrid, farther back, but somewhere. He shouldn't have been walking after some of the blows he took."

Footsteps on the kitchen stair had all three men turning to see the newcomer. Arthur appeared in the doorway with a weary smile.

"Any dinner left?" he asked.

Sirius waved a hand toward to the pantry. "Molly left you a bowl of stew. Did you just now leave work?"

Arthur disappeared into the pantry, emerging a few moments later shaking his head, his mouth full of bread and butter. He set his dinner on the table next to Kingsley and sat down. "I stopped by St. Mungo's to talk with Moody. Here," he dug a thin roll of parchment out of one pocket and tossed it onto the table. "Duty roster for the next week. I wish he wouldn't change ciphers every time, I can't keep track of them all."

"I'm amazed he handed this off. He's never done that before," Sirius frowned. "He must be more worried about Tonks than I'd imagined."

Remus shifted uncomfortably, relieved when Arthur answered Sirius' unspoken question without any further prompting.

"He says she'll make it through, though she's still having a tough time of it. She woke up earlier, a little while before I got there."

"And?" Remus demanded when Arthur paused.

"She didn't know where she was. Moody and the Healers ran in when they heard her screaming, but she'd reopened some of her wounds before they could stop her. They had to put her under again before she did more harm to herself."

Remus stared blindly, knowing what those first waking moments must have been like for her, trying not to imagine her panic-stricken struggle with the Healers.

"Wait, what do you mean, 'reopened'?" Sirius demanded. "Why haven't they healed her yet? How did she even wake up? I thought they were keeping her asleep!"

Arthur looked confused. "I..."

Kingsley cut in. "She's not a normal case. Either she doesn't heal from serious wounds the way the rest of us do, or the spell damage doesn't react to healing the way it should. Maybe both. Maybe that's why she woke up, too. I told you, the Healers are out of their depth with her, but they're doing what they can, Sirius."

Sirius subsided, but he looked as though he wanted to hit something.

"I'll go see Moody again tomorrow afternoon," Kingsley said. "Maybe I can convince him to go home and get some rest."

"Good luck," Arthur mumbled around a bite of stew. "I tried that already, he wouldn't listen."

Kingsley let out an irritated sigh and stood up. "I tried it, too. If I have to Stun him, I will. He's got the staying power of an ogre, but even he can't go three days straight without sleep. Remus, I'll stop by for your report before I go over." He nodded a farewell and strode out of the kitchen.

Lupin contemplated the last mouthful of whiskey in his glass.

"You should go see her."

He avoided meeting Sirius' eyes. "Don't you think I'd be a reminder of what happened and set her off again?"

Sirius shrugged. "Don't you think she might find it comforting to see that you're all right?"

For the life of him, Lupin couldn't explain why the thought of seeing Tonks filled him with such reluctance, but he knew that it wasn't something he could or wanted to talk about. He gave a small shake of his head. "It's a moot point for the time being, anyway. Scrimgeour wouldn't let me anywhere near her."

"He might," Sirius argued.

Remus rose, swaying on his feet. "We'll see. I need to get some sleep." He made his way slowly to the door, grateful that his weariness masked the fact that he was, in fact, fleeing the scene to avoid any more uncomfortable questions. He could feel Sirius' gaze burning a hole in the back of his head all the way out the door.

* * *

Lupin's report was finished well before Kingsley came to fetch it.

He'd expected nightmares to wake him in the morning, and they did, but he'd also imagined himself still too exhausted for this to happen until well after sunrise. No such luck. When fear chased his eyes open, there was no light coming in the windows, no comforting smells of breakfast. Dawn was still hours away, leaving him in the dubious company of those quiet, menacing night noises peculiar to a house steeped in decades' worth of dark magic, and his thoughts. Of the two, the noises were easier to deal with.

By the time the sky had begun to lighten, revealing a grey, dreary world both inside and out, he'd been glad to throw himself into the task of writing down everything that had occurred two days earlier. Putting those events down on parchment couldn't possibly be any worse than reliving it over and over in his own mind, whether awake or asleep, and at least this way he could focus on the dry details, scrupulously avoiding any emotional overtones that might try to creep in. Clinical, that was his objective, and rereading it when he was through, he thought he'd achieved it. The whole exercise felt cathartic in a way that relating the story to Kingsley and Sirius the previous night had not. He ate a quiet breakfast and went back to bed, falling into a deep sleep free of any kind of dream.

A coughing fit forced him awake hours later. He knew he should have dosed himself with something that morning, or even better, the night before when he'd first felt it coming on, a heaviness in his lungs that betokened the inevitable onset of illness whenever his body was pushed past its limits. The only medicines Sirius stocked in the house were to be found in the liquor cabinet, but surely Molly would have something on hand. He went downstairs with the intention of finding her, only to come up short on the bottom step as Kingsley walked in the front door.

"Afternoon, Remus," Kingsley greeted him quietly as he shrugged off his wet cloak. "Something wrong?"

Lupin realised he was frowning. "No, it's...I just woke up. I hadn't meant to sleep so long."

"Wouldn't you say you're entitled to it?"

Lupin shrugged. With a tip of his head to indicate that Kingsley should follow, he hurried down the corridor to the kitchen stairs as another spasm clutched at his chest.

"Have you taken anything for that?" Kingsley asked him as they reached the kitchen, the sound of coughing echoing back up the stairwell.

Molly was pulling bread from the oven. She straightened with a look of concern. "Goodness, Remus, you sound terrible."

"Sounds worse than it is," he answered. There was no need to ask Molly for a lung restorative; with brisk movements, she'd already Charmed the bread into the pantry, fetched the potion from a nearby cabinet and gotten him a glass of water. "You're a wonder as always, Molly."

Her cheeks pinked. "After six children, I'd hope I could do that in my sleep." As if Lupin was a child himself, she watched him swallow down the medicine, nodding in sympathy at the face he made afterward. "You'd think they'd find a way to make these things taste better. Hermione says some of the Muggle remedies taste like candy."

"They work about as well as candy, too," Lupin grimaced as he got himself a second glass of water to rinse away the taste. His lungs eased as the potion took effect. A quick look in the cabinet showed a few more vials of the stuff. "I'll pick up more, Molly, chances are I'll use up the rest of this."

"Don't worry about it," she shook her head as she bustled about the kitchen getting tea things ready. "I'll have Arthur pick more up tomorrow. You rest up."

Lupin found himself settled at the table with a bun and a cup of tea almost before he knew what was happening.

Kingsley grinned at him, deftly snagging two buns for himself before taking the seat across the table. "That report ready?"

"Yes. It's up in my room." Lupin started to get up, but Kingsley waved him back into his seat.

"Finish your tea. I need to talk with Sirius before I go anyway, there's time."

"How's Tonks doing?" Molly asked, interrupting Lupin's internal argument over asking the question himself.

Kingsley drained the last of his tea and let Molly pour him another cup before answering. His face had gone blank. "Better than she was, though her back's still not healing as it should."

"Do they know why?"

"No. It could be an after-effect of the spell, or the fact that she hasn't changed back yet. They're not sure."

Lupin frowned as a thought occurred. "I thought you said that it takes energy to hold a different form."

"It does."

"So why are they allowing it?"

"I think they'd force the change back at this point if they could, but they don't know how. The plan was to let her wake on her own today or tomorrow."

"Have the Healers said when she'll be allowed to leave?" Molly asked.

"No, but with Mad-Eye and Scrimgeour breathing down their necks, I'd imagine they're doing their damndest to get her healed up and out of there."

Lupin made a wry face. "Oh, I don't know, there's probably a few of them who feel that they've discovered alchemical gold. Metamorphmagi are rare enough that studying one is the opportunity of a lifetime."

"Assuming Mad-Eye lets them get anywhere near her for that sort of thing."

"True."

"If you're done," Kingsley nodded at Lupin's empty cup, "I should go find Sirius."

"He's probably up with Buckbeak." Lupin rose and, after thanking Molly for the potion and tea, followed on Kingsley's heels back up the stairs.

* * *

Thanks to **LadyRuthless**, **justwaitingontheworldtochange**, **strawhay**, **James 'Kendall' Potter**, **famous4it**, **aineee**, **TheOfficalGleek**, **NighttrollGirl**, **Tessiete**, and **fanficmaster29** for your reviews. For those of you who asked, Tonks' turn is coming, don't worry. ;)

I've been trying to keep to a posting schedule of one chapter every two months. However, the newest addition to my family is due in about four weeks, and while I'm hoping that this won't affect updates, it very well might, babies being what they are. If it looks as though the next chapter is going to be significantly delayed, I'll make a note in my profile around the beginning of November.


	10. Retreat

**A/N: Okay, folks, I've gone and screwed up the timeline. That's what I get for picking this up years after I started it. The last posted chapter (Awake) takes place the day _after_ this chapter, a small detail I overlooked when I wrote it, so it's been deleted. I'll repost 'Awake' next week as chapter 11; please don't be confused when you see familiar content. The following chapter is also finished and will be posted shortly after that, to make up for such a lame mistake on my part.**

* * *

Walburga Black's room stank of animal, underlaid by faint odors of blood and Firewhiskey. Lupin silently questioned again why Sirius kept the hippogriff. However unhealthy it was for a man to be holed up in this place, it could only be worse for a wild creature, gentled though it had become under Sirius' influence. The excuse that Buckbeak would be killed if caught grew weaker and weaker as time went by. No one was hunting it anymore. It seemed more likely that Sirius couldn't bear to let it go when he himself was still trapped here.

Both man and creature looked up from where they sat on the floor when Kingsley walked in, Lupin on his heels. Buckbeak quickly dismissed the two men, turning to nudge Sirius' forearm for another rat from the bloodstained bag lying between them.

"Gentlemen," Sirius nodded graciously, "please, sit down. I regret that the meal is somewhat informal, but that hardly matters among friends. Rat?" he offered gravely to Kingsley, who had squatted down next to him. The Auror made a face and batted Sirius' hand away. The rat flew out his grip toward Buckbeak, who caught it neatly and swallowed it down. "Not hungry, then? Moony, surely you'll partake. These are the finest rats my house has to offer, bar the ones that Kreacher steals from the traps, of course."

"Rat disagrees with me," Lupin smiled tightly and leaned against the wall just inside the doorway. The straw dust from Buckbeak's bedding caught in his throat and he was glad of the excuse not to go further into the room.

"Suit yourself," Sirius shrugged. "More for us."

Lupin caught Kingsley's look and wished he could reassure him. It was true that Sirius was _probably_ joking, but Azkaban had done stranger things to men than give them a taste for rat.

Sirius slanted his eyes toward them. "Was there something you wanted, then, or are you just here to catch the circus act?"

Kingsley cleared his throat into the strained silence. "Moody says that Tonks should be out of St. Mungo's in two or three days. They're still trying to assess how much her injuries have weakened her, but we're figuring that she'll need to stay off her feet for a while. She either goes back to her flat and someone stays with her there, or she comes here. Neither one of us are crazy about the first plan. We're already stretched thin as it is, between guarding Harry and the Ministry."

"Here, no question," Sirius said immediately, perking up. "We'll fix up a room, away from the twins, of course, or she'll never get any rest. What do you think, Remus, first or second floor?"

"Second floor," Lupin answered after some thought. "Ron will leave her alone, Hermione probably wouldn't. We just won't put her in the room right under the twins. The loo might pose a problem, depending on how much help she needs."

"We can always have Kreacher unearth one of the old self-emptying chamber pots," Sirius grinned.

"Just so long as she knows it was your idea. I want it to be your head she throws it at, not mine." Lupin turned to Kingsley. "If she needs that much help getting around, should we ask Molly to stay with her the first few days?"

Kingsley shook his head. "Tonks likes her privacy, Molly's hovering would drive her spare. That's assuming she doesn't throw a fit when she finds out that we're arranging all this without consulting her first. The healers are waking her up tomorrow, so plan on having her room ready by Wednesday. I don't think she'll be out by then, but it won't hurt to be prepared. When she wakes up I'll see what she wants from her flat and bring it over."

Lupin shifted. Tonks and Kingsley were colleagues and presumably friends, it made sense that she'd feel comfortable with him going through her personal things.

"We'll have her room done tomorrow," he said, a little too loudly.

Sirius and Kingsley both turned to look at him.

He crossed his arms, forcing himself not to sound defensive. "Like you said, better to be prepared. Although I'd be surprised if they let her out as early as Wednesday. Don't you think they'll come up with excuses to keep her there longer?"

"You've met Tonks?" Kingsley raised an eyebrow. "I'd like to see them try. Between her and Moody, it'd be an interesting case of 'Healer, heal thyself.'"

Sirius grinned. "She's her mother's daughter."

"Good thing she's on our side."

Lupin found he couldn't join in their amusement. He didn't know the Tonks they did. He'd seen her at her most vulnerable and, more than likely, at her most daring and courageous, but if they passed each other on the street he wouldn't have any idea who she was. It was like reading someone's diary before being introduced. What he knew of her personality was so fundamental to who she was that she may not have known it of herself. She may still not know, or realize the significance. If he were being honest, too much of what he felt towards her was awe, and a fascination he wasn't at all comfortable with.

A rat bounced off his shoe. "Hey," Sirius said. "Conversation. We're having one."

"Right. Sorry."

It didn't take long to wrap up the minor details of what she would need, and Kingsley went on his way, leaving the other two staring at one another, Lupin in obvious discomfort and Sirius well aware of the fact.

"I'll go get started," Lupin muttered, turning to go.

"She really got under your skin, didn't she?"

He whirled back around, furious. "I watched a man I'd happily see dead torture a little girl that I was helpless to protect! Please tell me why this continues to be so hard to understand!"

Sirius shrugged. "I don't think that's what's really bothering you."

"I'm not interested in what you think."

"Not many people are these days," Sirius said darkly, rising and walking toward the door. He brushed past Lupin. "Doesn't mean that I'm wrong."

* * *

Lupin stood poised in the centre of the small, stuffy bedroom, his wand trained on a hole in the ceiling in the far corner. Another wave of the galleon-sized, brown-striped spiders nesting there erupted from the hole, swarming down along the wall toward him. His arm slashed a vicious arc, the spell sending a rain of spiders down on the ancient carpet to join their dead brethren. Two more slashes and the wall was empty again. Another minute passed with no sign of more spiders. He sent a directed _Lumos_ into the hole. Nothing. A second _Lumos_, and a mild blasting curse which thudded into the ceiling hard enough to widen the hole and bring plaster raining down in that corner of the room, and still nothing.

"Come on, I know you're in there," he said. He edged closer, directing a long, thin rope of flame from the tip of his wand up toward the hole, careful to avoid the edges. Grimmauld Place was probably too damp to burn, but no point in taking chances. He sent a few sparks up, listening hard, and was rewarded for his persistence with a faint clicking, barely audible. _Gotcha. _Another quick burst of sparks brought his quarry raging through the ragged edges of the hole, the bulbous mass of it barely squeezing through.

An enraged queen umber spider was something to see, but not necessarily when one was facing it down alone. Lupin skipped backward toward the door, thankful that he'd had the foresight to prepare the trap first. She moved faster than her bulk suggested, chittering, all six of her red-black eyes catching the dim light as she scuttled toward him.

A sudden fit of coughing caught him by surprise. He fought it back as well as he could, but the noise made the queen veer from her beeline toward him and off to his left, away from an odd patch of carpet between them. He dodged right, hoping to bring her back on course, but she was still circling, down on the floor now and coming fast. In desperation he leaped over the odd patch of carpet, once again bringing it between them. She was only a few feet away now...

He cast a small ball of flame at the floor. There was a final, blinding burst of light, a crackling, a brief, horrifying sound akin to metal scraping across metal, and then silence. Lupin took a step forward and gingerly toed the charred exoskeleton of the dead queen.

"My apologies, your majesty," he rasped, still fighting back coughs. "You were in the wrong place at the wrong time." It was true. Umber spiders didn't usually nest in inhabited dwellings, but then, he supposed, nothing they found in this place should surprise him anymore. The nest had to be destroyed. One bite from a soldier, or even three or four, wouldn't seriously harm a person, although it would hurt like hell, but umbers were extremely territorial and swarmed like bees when they felt threatened.

His imagination cast up an image of a golden-haired girl, asleep and defenseless as hundreds of spiders crawled toward her, and suddenly he found himself repressing the urge to stamp the dead queen into a pile of ash on the floor.

"What's all the noise?" Sirius pounded on the door. "Moony, you okay in there?"

Lupin dissolved the wards and let Sirius in.

"I'm the only one allowed to knock down walls in this place, you know," Sirius said as he looked around, taking in the hole in the ceiling first. "What were you-" He recoiled. "What in the nine circles of hell is that?" he demanded, pointing at the queen, whose carcass was still faintly smoking.

"Umber spider. I had to lure it out, otherwise that hole would be smaller. Warn Molly not to let the children go near any holes in the wall when they're cleaning out unused rooms, we can't be sure there aren't more nests. Probably not, though. I'm surprised these were in here."

Sirius was eyeing the drifts of spiders along the wall with a look of revulsion. "What _is_ it with this place? It's like some bizarre...evil magnet."

"Umbers aren't evil," Lupin objected.

"Oh, really, they're just misunderstood?"

"Just...nevermind," Lupin sighed. Sirius' dislike of spiders was nearly as strong as what he felt toward his family. Arguing was pointless; Lupin turned to clean up the mess instead. A quick _Evanesco_ took care of the smaller spiders; the queen he left alone for the moment.

"Do not leave that thing in my house," Sirius said.

"I'm taking it to Hagrid, he might be able to figure out from the size how long the colony has been here."

Sirius made a face. "He's welcome to it, and any more you find around here. How'd you kill it, anyway?"

"Phosphor netting." Lupin pried up a corner of the now-blackened wire mesh with his shoe.

"I'm the only one allowed to burn this place down, you know."

"That carpet wouldn't catch fire if you tossed it in a volcano."

"Point," Sirius conceded. "You've been at this for over an hour. Take a break, we can both work on the room after dinner."

"Let me finish this up." Lupin bent down and started to roll up the length of netting along the floor.

"And leave you here so you can find something else that needs taking care of? I don't think so. Clean that...thing up later. Out. Go take a nap. Don't make me sic Molly on you."

"I don't need more sleep."

"Says the man who sounds like he's about to hack up a lung. You won't be much use to her if you keel over."

No question who "her" was. Lupin badly wanted to wipe the sly look off the other man's face, but it would only prolong the misery. If Sirius' plan was to force a tactical retreat, then it was working. Lupin left without another word, but his tormentor followed him out the door, keeping up a stream of cutting commentary all the way down to Lupin's room on the first floor. The only comfort Lupin could derive was that the content of what Sirius was saying, especially as regards to Tonks, was designed to force Lupin into doing exactly what he was doing―namely, get the hell away from Sirius as quickly as possible―rather than because Sirius put any stock into what he was saying.

Once back in his own room, though, Lupin couldn't escape the fact that Sirius had him well and truly pegged, even if he didn't realise the full extent of it. Dread and anticipation of seeing Tonks again made for an unpleasant mixture in the pit of his stomach, churning around with the humiliating knowledge that he was overthinking all of this and would probably make a complete ass of himself because of it. He needed to know the woman she was in order to banish the nightmares surrounding the girl she'd pretended to be, but there wasn't a rule of social behaviour anywhere in the world that covered their particular situation. He could almost wish that he'd never have to see her again, but that was a dangerous sort of wish to make, and it would be just his luck to get run down in the street tomorrow by a Muggle cabbie in answer.

It occurred to him as he was dropping off to sleep that there _was_ another option. Avoiding her while living in the same house would be nearly impossible, but there was always work to be done for the Order that required travel. He would talk to Dumbledore tomorrow. It wasn't running away, he told himself, so much as another tactical retreat. The nightmares would fade, and they'd both be spared any potential pain and awkwardness. Better for both of them in the long run.

* * *

**A/N, Part Two: Thank you to everyone who reviewed! As many other writers have said before now, reviews are like crack, and I'm not about to argue.  
**

**On to business. The fact that I did a bang-up job of not only screwing up the chapter order but also contradicting the established storyline in several places (the main reason this chapter was posted later than I'd wanted, since I had to track those bits down, check everything against previous chapters, and rewrite them again. Oh, how I hate rewriting...) has made me nervous. So consider this a general shout-out to my fellow nitpickers and grammar bitches. Represent, ladies (and gentlemen, if there are any). Glaring plot holes, redundancies, timeline blips, and typographical errors are all fair game. I'm open to suggestions for incentives, to make this a bit more sporting. Like fox hunting, only not nearly so inhumane (although possibly just as bloodthirsty).**


	11. Awake

Flames flickered along the top of the ridge. Tonks squinted against the rising wind and smoke haze, trying to gauge the speed of the approaching fire. A glance behind her showed nothing but the edge of a forest, where the shadows clustered together in strange shapes that had little to do with the line of trees above them. The wood held its own secrets, and there was little time to figure out which held more danger, the fire or the forest. Tonks turned back to the ridgeline, where the flames had gained the near side and now crept hungrily toward her. She took a step back, and another. There was laughter in the fire, but she was learning not to flee outright at the sound of it. Memory stirred. She had faced down that laughter once. The echo of screaming defiance drifted through the air along with the tendrils of smoke.

A prickling at the back of her neck made her turn once more toward the forest. A wolf watched her from the underbrush, standing just forward enough to be visible, its ruff bristled out. The roar of flames behind her drowned out all other noise, but she didn't need to hear the wolf's growl to know what the curl of lips and show of teeth meant.

There was nowhere to run. At least, a dry voice spoke in her mind, being eaten by a wolf would be a change. Could teeth ripping at her arms and legs be any more painful than burning in that godforsaken fire? The smell of burning hair and cloth filled her nostrils; ash and floating embers swirled around her. She brushed a negligent hand through her hair, her mind more on the wolf, waiting for it to spring. There was no escape, and no point in trying. She sank to her knees. As it launched itself for her, she made no move to save herself, simply closing her eyes. A rush of air on her face snapped them open again, staring in horror as the wolf leaped over her head and threw itself, snarling, into the fire.

* * *

This time when Tonks awoke, she knew it. After a few heart-pounding moments, her eyes rapidly flick over her surroundings, she even knew where she was. It was impossible to be an Auror for more than a month without having at the very least a nodding acquaintance with St. Mungo's. There was no one else in the room with her. She only had a minute or two, then, before a Healer showed up to check on her, alerted by spell the moment she'd woken up, only a minute to take stock before the poking and prodding and endless questions began.

She lay on her stomach, her head turned to face the door on the other side of the room. Whatever lay on her other side would have to remain a mystery; when she tried to turn her head the other way she found she'd been immobilized by what she assumed was a Petrificus spell. While she felt no pain, a prickling along her back spoke of potions merely holding it at bay. Her memories were all a blur, too caught up in the fire dreams to tell what was real and what wasn't. She sifted through them, trying to fit different pieces together, and grew frustrated when the edges refused to match up. Faces and events and sounds muddled together without any reference to time or location: screams, the stench of burning, crumbling rock, butterflies, Deatheaters and the far off singing of birds, an angel whose smile promised death. Tonks gasped, instinctively flinching away but unable to move, as laughter floated up out of her nightmares. Claremont. A burning flat. Lupin's face, bloodied and dirt-smeared.

Lupin. She wanted to believe that her own presence in St. Mungo's meant that he'd made it out alive. A few moments ago, she'd wanted the Healers to take their time; now, paralysed and full of unanswered questions, she impatiently waited for someone to show up. Thankfully it wasn't long before she heard voices at the door, though only one person came in.

"Well, girl, you've got some explaining to do," Moody grunted as he stumped over, looking around her room suspiciously, checking all the corners. "A right ruddy mess you and Lupin made of things, what with that Muggle building half-burned to the ground and Scrimgeour breathing down my neck. You're lucky the press never got hold of it."

He stopped next to her, summoned a chair with a quick mutter and flick of his wand, and sank down, glaring at her. He looked furious. Tonks, who knew him better, could read the anxiety and affection in his eyes, as well as the exhaustion as he slumped further into the chair. Guilt stabbed through her. He'd warned her, after all, and she hadn't listened.

"Well," he demanded, "let's hear it. Oh, wait, you can't- Stanis!" he roared at the door before turning back to her. "I told him he could damned well wait outside while I made sure of things in here."

Another man in healer green robes walked in on the tail end of Moody's comment, wearing a look of such stretched-thin patience that Tonks would have had to hide a smile, had she been able to. Moody on the best of days could be difficult; Moody, anxious and sleep-deprived, was utter hell, and Healer Stanis, to judge by his expression, had been experiencing this firsthand.

"Auror Moody," he nodded coldly. "The room appears to be free of potential thieves and murderers. Perhaps now I can check on my patient?" Healer Stanis was surprisingly young, but confident enough, or irritated enough, to bite back. "If you don't mind?" He gestured toward the door.

Moody gave him a hard look. "Well?"

"Hospital regulations state that only-"

"Regulations be damned!" Moody barked. "You've still got a Bind on her, she can't so much as twitch a finger and you want to send off the first friendly face she's seen in three days?"

_Three days?_ Tonks thought. She tried an experimental finger twitch and abruptly remembered the feeling of her fingers snapping as she forced them through Claremont's Petrificus spell, an unpleasant memory she quickly pushed aside. Unlike her back, there was no tingling or prickling in her hand; a good sign, and one she took to mean that her fingers had been fully healed and were as good as ever. Probably better, since she'd broken her pinky back in training and never bothered to get it fixed properly.

The two men were still arguing when she turned her attention back to the room.

"-to assess the extent of her injuries before we remove the spell."

"She's not stupid. Or deaf. Explain things to her, let her make her own decisions."

Tonks watched the healer walk toward her. She was surprised to see genuine concern in his eyes as he sank to one knee. He looked almost as tired as Moody.

"My name is Healer Stanis, as I'm sure you heard," Stanis shot a look at Moody. "I'm one of three Healers caring for you right now. The others are Healer Purvis and Healer Golding. Auror Moody brought you in four days ago. At the time your wounds were severe enough that we were forced to keep you unconscious in an attempt to keep you from metamorphosing back into your proper shape, since we had no way of knowing how this would affect your wounds. During that time you somehow woke from the spell and threw yourself from your bed. I don't mind telling you that we're still puzzling over that, no one's ever done such a thing before. Perhaps, if you're willing to come back once you're healed so that we might further study...?" He trailed off on a questioning note, interrupted by a growl from Moody.

"We can, ah, talk more about that later. After you woke up in such a manner, of course, we kept you in a Body Bind and a stronger sleeping spell to ensure that it couldn't happen again. We removed the spell keeping you unconscious this morning. The other healers and I agreed that once you were awake, the Body Bind spell could also be removed, if that was your wish, but only with the understanding that you must not transform, not in the smallest detail, until we can be reasonably sure it won't hurt you. We don't fully understand the nature of the spell that caused the damage, and you may do yourself further injury, perhaps irreparable, by changing shape at such an early stage in the healing process. All your other injuries have been healed, but the wounds on your back have proven...resistant. Moving around too much may reopen them, even now, so try to stay as still as you can.

"Now, knowing all this, would you like me to remove the Body Bind, or would you prefer to remain immobile during the examination? I can't guarantee that it won't hurt you; as I said, we don't understand your injuries. Frankly, we know very little about the differences in physical composition between a Metamorphmagus and that of a normal Witch or Wizard. It may be that our difficulties stem more from how your own body heals rather than the injury itself-"

"Merlin's balls, man!" Moody exploded. "I said let her decide, not lecture her back into unconsciousness!"

The healer flushed and cleared his throat. "Yes, well. She does need to be able to make an informed decision. Miss Tonks, please blink three times if you'd like me to remove the Body Bind, otherwise I'll leave it in place until I'm finished."

Tonks blinked so quickly she was afraid for a moment that he'd missed it. She'd deal with the pain; it was the feeling of helplessness that was making her edgy, not to mention the long-windedness of Healer Stanis. He knelt looking at her, bemused, then shook his head and stood up.

Moody snorted. "She's an Auror, lad, what did you expect?"

The healer ignored that as he pulled his wand out and released the spell. Tonks took a cautious deep breath and, feeling nothing more than stiffness, drew in a deeper one.

"How're you feeling, girl?" Moody asked.

"All right," she whispered, her voice dry from disuse. "Lupin, is he-"

"A little banged up, but he'll be fine. Just needs more rest, like you. We'll...talk more about it later." He glanced sideways at the healer.

"Are you in any pain?" Healer Stanis asked, standing over her.

"No."

"Good. I need to remove your bandages. If you feel pain, tell me immediately and try not to move."

Other than the pins-and-needles in her back getting stronger, Tonks felt no physical discomfort during the whole process, but her mind was awhirl with questions and a vague fear long before it was over. As the healer pulled aside the bandages covering her, she heard Moody's muttered oath. He wouldn't ask questions in front of her, not if the situation was bad, and he said not a word. Healer Stanis made a few comments to himself as he gently probed the wounds and cast diagnostic spells over her, but he spoke too quietly for Tonks to hear, and if Moody understood, she couldn't see his face to gauge from his expression how matters stood. She'd posed a hesitant question and been rebuffed immediately. She didn't try again.

After enough time had passed for her to very much regret that she'd agreed to hold herself still, Healer Stanis addressed her directly. "Miss Tonks, without moving your arms, please slowly flex your shoulders. Stop immediately if it hurts."

It didn't hurt, but the prickles were growing uncomfortable, much like when Claremont had first cast the spell. It had started as a tingling, spreading, and then had come the fire...

A shudder shook her from head to foot, though she tried to keep still as the healer had told her. _I'm safe_, she told herself, forcing both the clearer memories of her dreams and the hazier ones of what had truly happened back into the recesses of her mind. As her body stilled, she found that she'd curled arms and legs underneath herself. _I'm awake._

"Miss Tonks?" Healer Stanis dropped hurriedly to his knees. "Auror Moody, please go call for Healer Purvis, I need-"

"'m all right," she gasped out. It took a conscious effort to relax the muscles that were trying to curl her up into a ball.

"Are you in pain?" he asked, shining light from the tip of his wand into her eyes.

"N-no, not really, but my back, it prickles..."

"Yes, I think it's time for more potion. I'll be back in a moment," Healer Stanis said, rising and heading for the door. "Stay still," he admonished as he left.

"Moody?" Tonks looked around, not seeing the old Auror.

The sound of his wooden leg scraping on the stone floor came from the other side of the bed. She hadn't noticed him move there. He walked back around to where she could see him.

"I'm here."

"How...how bad is it?"

There was an uncomfortable silence. "It's not pretty. Stanis may be an arse, but he and the other healers know their business. In the end, you may have a fine set of scars to show off."

Tonks grappled with this. She'd never considered how the curious elastic quality of her skin dealt with injury, but one thing was certain: these would be the first scars she'd ever had. What if she couldn't metamorph them away? The thought unsettled her more than she'd have thought possible.

"Does it bother you?" Moody asked.

She looked at his war-torn face and tried to keep her voice light. "Well, it's not like it scored me a cool magical eyeball or anything."

Moody chuckled roughly. "That's my girl. Don't give those bastards the satisfaction of knowing they've gotten to you."

Tonks smiled but knew that she was lying. "Can I have some water?"

He chuckled again. "I can see you and Stanis are going to get on. Not much of a bedside manner, that one." Moody eyed her as he fetched a glass from a side table and poured out water from the waiting pitcher. "You think you can keep this down?"

Tonks nodded. The bed creaked as he sat beside her. With his help, she shifted to a position where he could hold her head up as she drank.

"Slow down there, you've not had anything in four days. No, you don't get more," Moody said in answer to the wistful look she aimed at the empty glass. "Tonks...I can guess what you were remembering earlier. You know that's going to keep happening unless you can work it out of your head."

Tonks nodded again, slowly, reluctant to talk about it. She wanted to ask how she could ever forget the things she'd seen, but looking at his face and knowing that most of his scars weren't external, she wasn't sure that he could give her an answer. 'Constant vigilance!' wasn't the motto of someone who had made peace with his nightmares.

Her nose itched. It felt good to be able to reach up and scratch it, to be in control of her own limbs and move around, if only a little. "Oh," she stopped herself, arrested by the sight of her hand. So small. It was easy to forget just _how_ small she was in this particular body. No wonder the healers were nervous.

"Aye," Moody said, interpreting her frown, "that didn't make it any easier for the rest of us. I think we'll all feel better once you're back in your own shape."

The re-entrance of Healer Stanis forestalled any further conversation. "Ah, you've given her some water?" Healer Stanis asked, noticing the glass in Moody's hand and Tonks' changed position. He was plainly struggling to keep his irritation off his face, although it bled into his voice as he strode over to the bed. "Well, 'stay still' sounds very much like 'have a drink,' so I'm glad to know that you take the orders of her healer seriously."

"Oh, leave him alone, I asked for it," Tonks told him as he bent to administer the vial of pain potion. She swallowed, grimacing at the foul taste.

Healer Stanis stood regarding the pair of them, the picture of offended disapproval, his professionalism at odds with his obvious desire to tell them both off. "Perhaps in a couple of days, Miss Tonks," he said tightly, "if I can trust you not to get out of bed, we'll see if you're ready to transform back to your usual, er, self."

"Hold on, now," Moody objected, rising to his feet, "Purvis said today or tomorrow!"

"He said if she were well enough," the healer shot back, raising his voice. "Her back hasn't healed nearly enough, and in my opinion she's not in a fit physical or mental state to try anything so taxing on her body. If you'd like to take it up with Healer Purvis, then be my guest, but I've had about enough of your-"

A terse knock on the door interrupted this building tirade, followed immediately by an older woman in nurse's robes who walked into the room and straight up to Healer Stanis. She spoke urgently into his ear.

"Now?" he asked in a low tone that Tonks could only just catch. "Can't you stall him?" The nurse spoke again and he sighed. "All right. Ten minutes, that's all he gets. I'll let her know."

The nurse nodded and left. Healer Stanis rubbed his forehead with one hand, looking suddenly exhausted. "I'm sorry, Miss Tonks. Auror Scrimgeour is downstairs waiting to speak with you. He'll be here in a few minutes."

* * *

**A/N: **Allergies + cold virus = blarg. Next chapter up next week, assuming that I'm back to normal and not still an ambulatory ball of phlegm.


	12. Hard Truths

"You're the healer," Moody muttered. "Tell him to go chase his own tail. She just woke up!"

Healer Stanis' lips curled up into a mirthless smile. "I think that's more in your line. My authority only stretches so far. He demanded yesterday that we inform him as soon as she woke. Healer Purvis correctly pointed out that she would be in no fit state to answer questions, and that we would need to assess her before such a conversation could take place. Auror Scrimgeour agreed to wait, although it's clear now that he was only humouring us. It was my intention to inform him later today, but he must be in the confidence of one of the nurses. He already knows she's awake and refuses to be put off again."

Moody's magical eye swiveled in its socket for a few seconds, focusing on something to the right. "He's in the elevator, Dawlish is with him. The others are still below. That's something, at least. Stanis, you'd better hope that nurse only told him she was awake, and you're a fool if you think he'll be on his way in ten minutes like some meek little lamb."

"I know that," the healer snapped. "I've done what I can."

"Like hell you have," Moody headed for the door. "You couldn't have bent over any faster."

"What are you doing?" Healer Stanis demanded.

"Your job!" Moody threw over his shoulder as he left.

Tonks watched Healer Stanis stiffen. He turned abruptly to face her, his face red as he glared at the floor.

"I'll be back in a little while. Stay in bed," he all but snarled, briefly turning his glare on her before stalking out.

Moody was, Tonks thought, being more than a little unfair toward Stanis. The healer was an uptight arse with an appalling bedside manner, no getting around it; still, caught between Moody and Scrimgeour was like some horrifying, modern version of Scylla and Charybdis. She'd been there herself, once and only once, and had decided at the time that she'd rather put out both her eyes with her own wand than repeat the experience. It was a wonder the poor man hadn't run gibbering through the halls yet.

Tonks sighed. Ordinarily, as spectacles went, this would have been as good as watching a pub fight. She wasn't really worried about having to face Scrimgeour. Moody was more than a match for him when his dander was up. Usually she wasn't all that cowed by the Head Auror either, who could certainly bite but preferred to rely on his bark. She'd rather avoid thinking too hard about what had happened for a while longer, though, which wouldn't happen if Scrimgeour got hold of her—he was as efficient at interrogation as a _Crucio_ was at causing pain, which was to say, extremely.

Tonks eased up onto one elbow, and when, after a few seconds, nothing untoward happened, she sat up all the way, letting her legs dangle over the side of the bed. Nothing but a slight wave of dizziness, quickly past, and not a twinge from her back. It was strange, she'd have thought that any pain potion that strong would have knocked her out again, but she felt more weak than tired. A quick examination of her hands showed them to be totally healed. No burn marks anywhere, no scratches, no bruises. She put her hand to her head and noticed that they'd cropped her hair short, probably to keep it off her neck and back. Her hand brushed the back of one shoulder and she jerked it away again, steadying herself on the bed as another wave of vertigo overtook her. The wounds were...pitted. She made herself take a few deep breaths.

_Okay_, she told herself. _They warned you. Not pretty. Like Moody said, cool scars. Maybe they're not all like that..._ She brought her hand hesitantly around to her lower back, exploring gently with her fingertips. She'd been right. They weren't all like that. Some were worse.

The hospital rooms of St. Mungo's didn't have mirrors, which left transfiguring something into a mirror if she wanted a look at the damage. She took in her surroundings more carefully. The only place to store her wand was a little bureau across the room. _Of course._ She glared at it, irritated, although a small part of her welcomed the irritation as a means of pushing down a rising, unnamed fear.

Well, Stanis was already mad at her, and besides, even with the little he knew of her, he couldn't honestly think she'd listen. It would be a shame not to live up to her reputation as a difficult patient.

She peered over the edge of the bed, briefly cursing the choice of such a small body. It was quite the drop to the floor in this shape. So much for her dignity. She carefully flipped over onto her stomach and let herself down by holding onto the sheets, vague memories of doing this as a little girl making the whole thing that much more embarrassing. As her hospital robes hiked up the further down she went, she fervently hoped no one came in just now, especially considering that she wasn't altogether sure she had anything else on under the robe. Only after she stood swaying at her bedside, clutching the sheets to keep herself upright, did it occur to her that she might have lengthened her legs without risking either her back or her self-respect.

Shaking her head in irritation, she judged the distance to the bureau and realized that she'd never make it there walking. Her legs were trembling harder than trees in a storm. Teeth gritted, she let herself down onto the cool stones—yes, she decided, she was at least wearing _something_ under the robe—and started crawling across the room. Screw dignity anyway, as long as she'd come this far. Maybe she could just say she'd fallen out of bed again. Maybe she should have just fallen out of bed in the first place, since Moody was probably keeping tabs her anyway. Stupid hindsight.

About two-thirds of the way, the muffled sound of angry voices outside the door sorted itself out into distinguishable conversation. She rested, panting. Yet another question to ask when she got the chance: if she'd been asleep for three days, she should be bouncing off the walls, so why the hell was she exhausted by four feet of crawling on hands and knees?

"I've half a mind to take you into custody, Alastor. This is a clear obstruction of the law," she heard Scrimgeour say.

"Nothing's stopping you, Rufus. There's two of you. Well, one-and-a-half."

"Sod off, you loony bastard."

"That'll do, Dawlish. Alastor, I'm warning you..."

Tonks rolled her eyes. Moody clearly had the upper hand in this argument if Scrimgeour was resorting to empty threats. She resumed her way toward the bureau, listening all the while.

"That's right, Rufus. You go ahead and make a scene in this nice, quiet hallway. Not the sort of thing people like to have happen when their loved ones are suffering in the next room over. You've got a losing hand, be man enough to admit it and walk away with your pride intact."

"And give you another day to coach her? What kind of fool do you think I am?" Scrimgeour's voice rose a notch.

"A big enough fool to come all the way here assuming I'd let you get your claws into her before she's strong enough to handle it."

_Almost...there..._

"Says the man one step away from the mental ward. Your paranoia is making you a laughingstock."

"Better to be a laughingstock than the tool of politicians and traitors. At least I know who the enemy is."

Tonks winced. It was down to personal insults now. She drew herself up, scrabbling the top drawer open. Sure enough, there was her wand, along with the sandals she'd been wearing. The dress nowhere in sight.

"Oh, so I'm the enemy now?"

"No, you're worse. You'd rather bury your head in the sand and pretend there's nothing happening. No wonder Fudge likes you so much."

A dangerous silence fell. Tonks grabbed both sandals and hurriedly transfigured them into hand mirrors. With a little maneuvering she was able to shift her robe off her shoulders.

"Speaking of enemies, you're making more than you can handle." Scrimgeour's voice dropped almost too low to be heard through the door.

"If you're the worst of them, I'll count my blessings."

"I'll be back tomorrow, and if I have to arrest you to get in that room, I will."

"I'll be sure to mark my calendar."

The tread of boots faded quickly away as Tonks held up the mirrors, trying to position them correctly without pulling at the wounds on her back, but finally she got a clear view of the base of her neck and upper shoulders.

The mirrors fell to the floor, glass smashing into shards.

Moody burst in the door. "You damned girl, why couldn't you just wait for me to get back? Sneaking around like I don't know what you're up to. You should have known it wouldn't take long to-" He broke off, seeing the tears running down her cheeks. "Oh, lass," he sighed. With a quick movement and a muttered _Reparo_ he fixed the mirrors and then gently picked her up, staggering a bit as she threw his balance off.

"What did he do to me? W-what if I can't morph them away?" she sobbed into his chest.

Moody sat on the edge of the bed, cradling her. He didn't bother answering, instead rocking her back and forth until the fit of crying subsided.

Tonks wiped her eyes on the back on her hand and looked up. He wore a strangely tender expression on his face. He also looked tired to death.

"Sorry," she said softly. "You didn't need that. When was the last time you got some sleep?"

"Here, don't do that!" Moody scolded as she went to wipe her nose on her hospital robe. He laid her on the bed before pulling a handkerchief out of one pocket and handing it to her. His hand shook. "Don't you fuss at me, you worry about getting healed up so I don't have to play the dragon at the door again. I suppose you heard everything."

"Most of it, I guess. Looks like you're on the naughty list."

Moody snorted. "He can't touch me and he knows it. That was just bluster. But he's right, I can't keep him out forever." Moody sank down into the chair beside the bed.

"Go home and get some sleep," Tonks told him. Now that she looked more closely at him, his skin tone bordered on grey, his good eye bloodshot and red-rimmed. "You look like hell."

"Sleep yourself," he retorted, returning her glare. "You're worse than a nursemaid," he added sourly. "I'm not leaving until Kingsley gets here, no buts."

Tonks let out the breath she'd been holding. He was as close to his physical limits as she'd ever seen him, which scared her, but then a part of her desperately needed the sense of safety his presence provided, which, if anything, scared her more. There was an unaccustomed vulnerability lying just below conscious thought; she could feel it now as she thought about Moody's departure. She was skating on thin ice, and she hated it.

"What about my parents?" she asked.

Moody shook his head. "Sorry, lass. If you'd been worse, we'd have sent for them, but we've had to hush this up. It'll only be a few more days."

"Oh," she said. "What...what about Lupin?"

The question seemed to surprise them both.

"What about him?"

"I..." Tonks stopped, confused. She wasn't sure why she'd asked, only half aware that in her present state of mind she was reaching out for whoever inspired similar feelings of trust and protection that Moody and her father did. It wasn't rational, she knew that. Life as an Auror had taught her better. Hell, Moody would be the first one to disabuse her of the idea that anyone, even her father, could be trusted so implicitly, but it didn't change the simple fact that there were certain people in whose presence one felt...safe. After what they'd been through, maybe it wasn't all that strange that Lupin now made the short list. And all that aside, he was the only one who could fill in the substantial gaps in her memory about their escape.

"I'd like to talk with him," she said. "If someone's got to be here, then two birds, one stone and all that."

"It's a little risky, him coming in here just now. Scrimgeour has an inkling that this is tied Dumbledore somehow. Seeing Lupin would only confirm that, if word got back, and that would put you under suspicion too. Now, don't give me that look. Let me find out from Stanis which nurse is behind that visit just now, so we know which shifts to avoid, maybe we can sneak him in."

"Judging from Stanis' face when he left, I don't think you have to worry about that particular nurse for a while."

Moody's smile was unpleasant. "True. Guess he's good for something."

"Be nice."

"I'm not here to be nice to that spineless git. Priorities!" he barked as she started to protest. "Think, girl! Scrimgeour was right about one thing, you need your story straight when he comes back tomorrow or the jig's up. Kingsley got the details from Lupin on the whole thing so we could piece something official together, but your story has to match up with what Scrimgeour thinks he knows."

Tonks nodded, berating herself that she had to be reminded of something so basic.

Scrimgeour, she learned, hadn't been told the full extent of her injuries, and remained entirely ignorant of the _Viscus Perussi_ spell. Moody was playing a dangerous game, pitting the ignorance of her healers against that of the Auror office. The healers would back Moody up for the time being, accepting his excuse of the risk to Tonks' career if Scrimgeour had cause to believe that she could no longer do her job. Scrimgeour needed to believe that her injuries were minimal, or he'd have cause to doubt that she'd managed her escape without help. Neither party knew, of course, of Lupin's involvement. The longer they stalled Scrimgeour, the shakier her defense became, which meant that she needed to play up a lingering confusion due to the "severe concussion" she'd received, and downplay her actual weakness.

_Not a problem_, she thought wryly. _My memory's more like Swiss cheese anyway._

"You got out of the building, Apparated to another part of the city, and sent your Patronus to fetch me," Moody concluded. "You don't remember doing that. And I don't officially know how you escaped, so that part's up to you. Just keep it simple. You go making it all fancy and he'll catch you up."

Tonks rolled her eyes. "Yeah, Moody, because I haven't had all this drilled into me a dozen times already during training."

"Not by me, you didn't. Substandard training, that's what you get these days. They used to-"

"No, no, stop right there, I don't want to hear about how you lost a toenail every time you failed those stupid lie tests."

"Don't be ridiculous! We lost toenails for failure to cast the-"

"Mad-Eye, no!" Tonks covered her ears. "Priorities, remember?"

"Yes, well," he subsided. "Any questions?"

She thought over everything he'd said, and something occurred to her. "What's their story about the Death Eaters? I mean, Scrimgeour thought that tip we got was absolute crap and only stuck me on the case because someone had to follow up. Now we've got these wankers in custody and he can't just ignore the fact that they attacked an Auror with no provocation, right?"

"Tonks," Moody interrupted. He looked away. "Damn it, I'd hoped to put this off. We don't have them. Kingsley went back to sweep the building and call in reinforcements if necessary. There was no one there."

Her questions forgotten, Tonks felt her breath catch in her throat. Cruel laughter slithered around the edges of conscious thought.

"At least one of them must have woken up and got the rest away. Kingsley even pulled away the rubble at the bottom of the stairs and...nothing." Seeing her blank stare, he frowned. "How much do you remember?"

"The flat," she whispered. "I think there was a fire." She forced down a breath, shaking her head in denial and a futile attempt to dislodge the laughter. "Nothing really after that."

"Lupin said you pulled the stairs down on top of Claremont before you blacked out. There's every chance he's dead, girl." Moody covered her hand with his. "I don't think you need to worry."

"How many others?" Tonks asked suddenly.

"What?"

"The others. Earlier, you said the other Aurors stayed downstairs. And you've been here all this time." Tonks pulled her hand away. "Don't lie. The Order can't afford to spare anyone to keep watch over me right now, now between the watches on Harry and the Ministry. And Scrimgeour sure as hell wouldn't waste two good Aurors on something like this unless you all thought there was an active threat. So don't tell me not to worry!"

"Tonks-"

It was ridiculous to feel a sense of betrayal over what was certainly a lie of omission meant to protect her, but she felt that way all the same. The thin veneer of control she'd managed to build up began to crack. "I want to talk with Lupin."

"Tonks, be reasonable, I told you we likely can't get him in here."

"I need to know what happened!"

"No!" Moody said, raising his voice. "The less you know, the better, until Scrimgeour's through with you. Pick Lupin's brain all you like afterwards."

Tonks picked at the corner of her pillow, fighting off another wave of tears and raging against her own helplessess.

"He's dead, girl. He can't hurt you now."

Their eyes met. Tonks dropped her gaze almost immediately and shivered. "You don't know that."

* * *

**A/N: Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed! You're all hard core, sticking around this long. Only one more chapter, and then we get to see Remus in all his awkward glory when they finally meet face to actual face.**


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